Break enigma, win valuable prizes!

[babysimon]

ciphergoth, seen this?

Comments

[lovingboth]

Oooh, tricky...

[duranorak.livejournal.com]

Eee, ways to get the Beatles stuck in your head...~sigh~
Marvellous. Well, it's a way to spend...er...half a minute...

E.
x

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Oh. I cheated.

egrep '^e.e..$' /usr/share/dict/words
egrep '^..b.....e$' /usr/share/dict/words

Now if it had been me, the magic words would have been squeamish ossifrage.

[babysimon]

Don't you mean:

egrep '^e....$' /usr/share/dict/words

That makes it harder - but yeah, it's probably an enemy submarine. Pity. I was hoping for something which actually required cryptanalysis.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

No, look again, it shows the same letter in the first and third positions.

I made that guess, read the comments before verifying it, then saw duranorak's post and knew I was right...

[babysimon]

No, look again, it shows the same letter in the first and third positions.

Where do they say it's a monoalphabetic cypher? IIRC Enigma wasn't.

[babysimon]

...which pisses me off, because I'd assumed it was encrypted in Enigma, and was thus going to be hard to break (by my standards!), so I didn't try. And now I look silly.

Stupid Blockbuster!

[djm4]

Yeah, it encodes the phrase by the utterly secure method of shifting all the letters alphabetically by one. Rot-1 encoding, in other words. J dpvme qspcbcmz xsjuf jo uibu 'dpef' xjui wfsz mjuumf fggpsu. ;-)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It's a good first thing to try. I'd never guessed it would be as easy as ROT-1 though!

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Pretty much all commercial puzzle ciphers are monoalphabetic substitutions.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

Indeed. The power of grep -E. :)

With a quick perl hack there don't seem to be any other matches in my /usr/dict/words which match the assumption of a single letter substitution cipher. It's a shame that "enema submarine" failed at the last hurdle. :)

I used to do these things so often as a kid that when I came across rot-13 on usenet I recognised it as a character substitution cipher (and that r was e) and sat down and did the standard pencil-and-paper frequency and small-word thing. Only when I had 20 letters filled in did I notice that it was just a rotation. :) We used to do this kind of thing to win bags of sweets though, not iMacs! If only I were a kid now.

Was that a computer code? Have I just broken the Y^HDMCA? :)