Badge Challenge Build Part 4


In this post I will cover more of the puzzle.<p> In part 2 I outlined the hex on the badge, but people need a hint, so we need a way to point people at the puzzle.<p>

Last year we did a bit of ROT13 in the guide book, this year I wanted something a bit the same but not exactly the same, my artistic guy did up a page of words and then we ciphered them.<p>

If we had all the cipher text printed in the guide book, people would have to type in all the text before they could solve it, so we had a page put up at the kiwicon site and a link written in the book.<p>

The cipher that I chose was atbash, basically a reverse order alphabet.<p> So A->Z and B->Y <p>

This could be solved by looking for “cribs”, things that you can guess what the plan text will be.<p>

For example:<p> sggkh://ddd.prdrxlm.lit/uzj/xlwv-lu-xlmwfxg/ <p> This is very likely to be “https://www.”<p>

The other way this could be solved would be with some frequency analyses, we all know that “E” is the most common letter in english, this may also give more cribs.

LINKS:

Whats that number on my badge

Atbash cypher on wikipedia

Atbash decoder

Cribs on wikipedia