Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat

laz0r · Post by **laz0r** » Mon Mar 22, 2010 4:33 pm

How did people find this challenge? Feedback would be appreciated.

The challenge was intended to be hard if you attempted to solve it manually, but fairly easy if you knew what you were doing and spotted the connection in the title.

tails · Post by **tails** » Fri Mar 26, 2010 3:32 am

It is not very hard to solve this cipher manually, for it's just a simple substitution cipher, and the text is long enough for guessing. The hardest part to me was to search for the answer after solving the cipher. I compared the decrypted text with the original one, in vain.

By the way, is the order of uppercase letters just random?

laz0r · Post by **laz0r** » Mon Apr 19, 2010 9:23 am

It's a polyalphabetic cipher. It's two ciphers running side by side, distinguisable by the upper and lower case letters. The lower case letters are encrypted with a keyword cipher, the keyword being Germany, the answer. The upper case letters are encrypted as a substitution cipher.

Did you only solve the lowercase letters?

miroe · Post by **miroe** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 9:39 pm

Solved it manually too (was feasible, but I should have thought about the title)

, but the idea to hide the solution in the cipher was not too hard to guess. Anyway, I liked it!

Btw, the last letter of the encrypted text is missing!

laz0r · Post by **laz0r** » Thu Nov 25, 2010 1:12 pm

Ooo, thanks, I doubt that it's worth notifying adum to change it but thanks anyway.

Solving a polyalphabetic manually must prove quite difficult (unless using a program that implements the churn algorithm and solve the two monos seperately).

tripleedged · Post by **tripleedged** » Wed Aug 24, 2011 10:21 pm

I solved it by hand, too. It was quite easy to spot the "the" and after that there was a "T___THE_", that could only be "together". From that point it was quite straight forward. I needed to read the forum anyway, because I wasn't sure about what to do next...
There is a sentence: "I CAN ANSWER IN ONE WORD IT IS VICTORY" I was quite certain that the passphrase is in the text, but after reading the thread, it became quite clear, that the solution is in the key. Ok, another easy, but tormenting task. But it is called "Blood, toil, tears, and sweat", so it shouldnt be that refreshing...
It took me some time then, but since I have noticed the strange formation of substitution in the lowercase version, it was manageable...

Nice challenge!

Mon Sep 05, 2011 5:11 pm

Well, the original text was easy to find due to the title of the challenge. I found an article about Churchill's speech on Wikipedia, and a link to the full text. Looking at the word length/spaces layout, it was quite obvious that this was indeed the original text which was encrypted here.

Then I looked at which letter in the original is encoded by which letter(s) in the ciphertext. At first the solution escaped me, but when I re-ordered it to be "lowercase substitution letter first, then uppercase substitution letter", voilà it spelled

Code: Select all

a = g, M
b = e, P
c = r, E
d = m, D
e = a, A
f = n, C
g = y, H

swgr · Post by **swgr** » Fri Dec 23, 2011 8:11 pm

I have to say that this challenge is very, very similar to another challenge in hacker.org...

trez0r · Post by **trez0r** » Wed Mar 14, 2012 3:44 pm

I decrypted the text without knowing what it was (the hint didn't strike me) in about half an hour with a simple translating python script and a pro guesswork of myself.

Then it was about trying out the more standing out words of the text and i got it on around 5th try.
Overall i enjoyed the challenge.

Hippo · Post by **Hippo** » Thu May 22, 2014 9:30 pm

I have improved my php page doing statistics of the given text and comparing the statistics revealed the substitution easily. After full translation I have found the exactly same original. So it must have been encodded in the transformation ... I failed to see it on the first attempt ... I have considered differences in using upper/lower variant and simmilar other hiding places.

Finally I have found lowercase germany. I missed what is hidden under uppercase.