substitution
Dr. Stephens,
I got it -- I think.
Gino W they accuse me of arrogance, and perhaps of misanthropy, and perhaps
of madness, such accusations (for which i shall extract punishment in due
time) are derisory. It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also
true that its doors(whose number is infinite) are open day and night to
men and to animals as well. -The house of Csterion-Jorge Luis Borges
Solution: I used your program to first count the occurrences of letters.
I noticed that there is a large number of cipher d's and t's. I also
noted the pattern coe was used a couple of times. I started by substituting
"and" & "the" for coe. "the" did not work. Therefore, I used "and". I then
substituted s for t's. I noticed the following: AeNdSS.S I then decided
since d was used frequently to substitute the E nADNESS. I substituted
the m and then the rest of the letters fell into place.
I am not sure of the word Csterion. I tried searching through UMBC's
database Victor to find a matching title by Jorge Borges and had no luck.
XXXXXXXX
************************************************************************
> Jlomw qidyc bbutd ndmgc ppmjc obd,co erdpi crtmg nhtco qipmry,
> coerd picrt mgnce odtt.T ubicb butcq hmot(g mpwih biJti ckk
> dxqpc bqruo htind oqhoe udqhn d)cpde dphtm py.Jqh tqpud qicqJ
> odvdp kdcvd nyimu td,auq hqhtc ktmqp udqic qhqte mmpt(w imtd
> ounad phtho ghohq d)cpdm rdoec ycoeo hjiqq mndoc oeqmc ohnckt
> ctwdk k.-TidI mutdm gBtqd phmo-f mpjdk uhtam pjdt
>
>
I know they accuse me of arrogance, and perhaps of misanthropy,
and perhaps of madness. Such accusations (for which shall
extract punishment in due time) are derisory. It is true that I
never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose
number is infinite) are open day and night to men and to animals as
994
well. -The house of B sterion- Jorge Luis Borges
Dear Dr. Stephens,
The author's name from cipher1a gave it away for me. But I'm still
not sure about the "B sterion" part !?! Is it correct? I used the
program "substitute" that you gave us. It's very helpful. I hope I'd
made it to one of the first three people to solve it.
Sincerely yours,
XXXXXXXX
*******************************************************************
** I am mailing cipher1b to you and handing in my hard copy on Mon.
hopefully to have cipher3b solved by Mon. and hw2 as well.
I will come to your office before class to discuss project3 and
hw2, because I get that X has no inverse
Ciphers 1A and 1B are simple substitution ciphers.
This is Cipher1B which is the more difficult version. It is worth
25 points. First to solve gets an additional 15 points - second
to solve get 10 additional points and third fastest gets 5
additional points. If you solve this cipher and think that you are
one of the first, send solution and brief description of your
method to : stephens@cs.umbc.edu
Jlomw qidyc bbutd ndmgc ppmjc obd,co erdpi crtmg nhtco qipmry,
coerd picrt mgnce odtt.T ubicb butcq hmot(g mpwih biJti ckk
dxqpc bqruo htind oqhoe udqhn d)cpde dphtm py.Jqh tqpud qicqJ
odvdp kdcvd nyimu td,auq hqhtc ktmqp udqic qhqte mmpt(w imtd
ounad phtho ghohq d)cpdm rdoec ycoeo hjiqq mndoc oeqmc ohnckt
ctwdk k.-TidI mutdm gBtqd phmo-f mpjdk uhtam pjdt
The plain text solution of this cipher is:
I know they accuse me of arrogance, and perhaps of
misanthropy, and perhaps of madness, such accusations
(for which I shall extract punishment in due time) are
densory. It is true that I never leave my house, but
it is also true that its doors (whose number is
infinite) are open day and night to men and to animals
as well. -Jorge Luis Borges
Methodology:
I used the substitution program you gave us and by
exhaustion, I substituted letters according to the
frequency counts. At first, I couldn't see any
English words because I was looking for words
according to the spaces. Once I got the 'e' and 't'
('d' and 'q' of ciphertext), I guess that 'h' was
encrypted by 'i'. I thought I had the word "there"
in the first line, but the 'e' did not match to be
'd' and 'c'. Then I figured out that spaces did not
matter and continued to substitute until I got the
plaintext. I thought you used a shift cipher since
some of the substutions where 1 or 2 characters away,
left or right. That helped me choose my substitutions.
The last line where the work and the author are cited
gave me trouble, but I recognized the author from
solving cipher1A, and that helped me decipher the
capitals.
***************************************************************************
columnar transposition
anonymous..........
they placed a wreath upon his door
soon they will carry him away
he stopped loving her today
you know, she came to see him one last time
we all wondered if she would and it kept running through my mind,
this time he's over her for good
george jones -"he stopped loving her today"-
I used the program you gave us to look at the different possible
rectangles, to see which rectangle would give the best possible
english text by the numbers of vowels in their columns. The rectangle
with 18 rows seemed to me the most likely. So I printed them out and
played around anagramming the first row. I came up with the word "placed"
and worked my way from there.
*******************************************************************
knapsack
The method used in solving this cipher revolved around
a program I wrote to take each cipher text number and
find its sumed parts in the hard vector. For each
Hard vector element that was part of the sum of a particular
cipher text number, it received a 1 and all others received
a 0. This then created a string of 1's and 0's that
represented 16 bits. I then broke up the 16 bits into 2 bytes
(8 bits each). I reversed the order of these bits and the
corresponding bytes represented their ASCII equivalent.
Please Note, in order to solve the characters > 128,
I had to take the (plaintext) mod 128. This then gave me the proper
ASCII plaintext. There were still a few characters I had to fix according to
the
following character mapping:
4-r (-e
5-s *-g
8-u - k
$-b :-w
%-c
The program I wrote did all the work and is included in the
handout.
****************************************************************************
Hill's Cipher
This one got on my nerves! But finally, a solution
My way is in the sand flowing between the shingle
and the dune the summer rain rains on my life,
on me. My life, harrying, fleeing to it's
beginning, it's end. My peace is there in the r
receding mist when I may cease from treading
these long shifting thresholds and live the space
of a door that opens and shuts.
Samuel Beckett - Poems in English (zzzzh)
key matrix inverse = 1 0 0 0 0
25 1 0 0 0
0 25 1 0 0
0 0 25 1 0
0 0 0 25 1
I better be the first to solve this because I made sooooo
many mistakes trying to break it using the program you sent
us. I'll write a full report in the hardcopy.
**************************************************************************
Vigenere
Here is my solution to Cipher 4:
`r c4.out
XXXXXXXXXX
Cipher 4: Viginere
Don Juan was sitting on the floor, by the door of his
house, with his back against the wall. He turned
over a wooden milk crate and asked me to sit down
and make myself at home. I offered him some cigarettes.
I had brought a carton of them. He said he
did not smoke but accepted the gift. We talked about
the coldness of the desert nights and other odinary
topics of conversation. I asked him if I wwas
interfering with hi normal routine.......
carlos castenada journey to ixtlan
I started out breaking this cipher with a Kisiski attack,
quickly discovering that the key length was five. This agreed
with my guess from the spacing of the $'s in the ciphertext.
Next I did a frequency analysis of each of the five alphabets,
and guessed the shift of each of the alphabets not just from the
highest frequency (which I sometimes falsely assumed was E), but
also looking for three high-frequency letters in a row (i.e. RST).
As it turned out, I had the first three letters of the key right,
and I saw that the First three letters of the plaintext were 'Don,'
and figured that the next two would be 'Ju,' since it fit so well
with the rest of the line. The final key I used was 'NALTX.'
********************************************************************