6b vigenere key

[Anonymous]

How exactly were we meant to work out the vigenere key for 6b from the previous answers? I can’t find anything that really hints to using farmers death in Latin as the key

[Anonymous]

I mean, I worked out the key from freq analysis (and guessing) but Agricola (the word for farmer) is also the name of the writer of parts B’s father-in-law. Anyway, he was mentioned in the previous chapters and in Chapter 5 it says:
“AGRICOLA FACED A RETURN TO ROME, HUMILIATION AND ALMOST CERTAIN DEATH.” which would then follow to become AGRICOLAEMORTEM (or maybe without the e I can’t remember exactly). he’s also mentioned to be dead in Challenge 0: “My dear departed father in law”

That’s sorta where the hints are, I hadn’t actually spotted them before now, but they are there!

[Anonymous]

well you don’t necessarily needed to know the key to work out the cipher. I myself didn’t know the key, but figured out a few words here and there using kasiski’s method, and then realised that it was a cipher similar to quagmire 3, and so started writing out a big table on a physical piece of paper. Then, i realised that if i tried to solve for an affine cipher, i was getting the coefficient to be a 7 quite frequently, so just solved each alphabet, and got the keyword to be agricolaemortem.

[Anonymous]

Yeah we noticed that it was very similar to the Quagmire cipher, and we just needed to work out one row of the table and then we had the entire keyspace, while we were working on it by hand, we had a team member create a quagmire solver which we then put the cipher text in for the answer!

[Anonymous]

Do you fancy writing a page or two about how you cracked this one, and maybe describing the code you wrote for it, maybe as pseudocode? We would love to publish it on the site next year to encourage others. Harry

[Author]

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