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[chippy]

[SOLVED] job application puzzle

[TobyNTucker]

trying a rotating ROT one of the earlier puzzles used it

[ItWasntMeISwear]

p

[chippy]

Your, Fair, Not, Two, The and congr - would this indicate that a key would be 4 letters long?

[chippy]

arghh!!! gotta get this one solved..

well cfa probably stands for Canis Familiaris
http://tinyurl.com/6r3t6 (google)

and if we take the 16176 letters from the code it gives us : wbwww
www.wb = warner brothers. tried scoobydoo, scrappy, rin tin tin, lassie but got nada

[Russell]

How did you convert the number? Although i think this is the wrong track.

[chippy]

yeah, im getting a bit desperate but i used each number to count the number of letters in so 1=W 2=I 3=H 4= A 5=L 6=B 7=W

[deadman]

Your method actually results in wbwwb. It doesn't look helpful. I'm also skeptical that Cfa stands for Canine familiaris, but I don't have any better ideas. I was thinking that maybe a Vigenere cipher is in place, and so maybe it's Ref. or something... like it is referencing a record. Even so, the bottom part doesn't retain spaces, but there is a space after Cfa., and punctuation too.

The dog thing is confusing. It's not encoded like the bottom part. I'm wondering if that means it is needed, are at least useful, in figuring out how to decode the message. I too have tried various dog keys, but I don't have anything concrete yet.

[deadman]

Chippy asked if the key was likely to be 4 characters long. With a Vigenere cipher, mathematically, a key of length four show a letter distribution that is basically random. Using a measure called the index of coincidence, which should be about 6.6% for english text and 3.8% for random text (google it for more info), shows that a likely key length for this text is 3,7, or 6 - in about that order.

[TobyNTucker]

Re: Rotating ROT?

[TobyNTucker]

I came upon something interesting, haven't had a chance to try it out yet though.

Perhaps it is a rectangular transposition and a ROT
I found this
(about half way down the page is a section on increasing the security of the transposition cipher. The suggestion is to use a short keyword in order to determine the route through the matrix. What is interesting as well is that the chosen keyword in this example is "cat"

My plan is to try not only the original matrix, but the ROTed ones also.

thoughts?

[ItWasntMeISwear]

p

[ellipses]

Erm - when the code was originally posted by ItWasntMeISwear it had an extra M on the end, making it 115 characters long. Which one is right?

[ItWasntMeISwear]

p

[JoeUser]

Well that's not actually true. Key lengths for Vigenere don't have to be exact factors of the length of the message. You keep repeating the key until you run out of plaintext.

What deadman is talking about is using frequency analysis to predict a probable length of the key. You look at repeating series of letters.

Of course, none of what I just wrote actually helps find a key, but I didn't want you stuck on only two possible key lengths.