Official help for 5a

[Anonymous]

If we are converting the u into 1 colour and the e into another, how are we supposed to submit it?

[Anonymous]

I think I know what to do but I have no idea how to do it. For instance when I copy the U’s and E’s bit to word it changes the format so there are 13 per line which I think is important.

[Anonymous]

Can I get any points at all from part A?

[Anonymous]

When is the hint for part A coming out? I’ve got 100% on part B really easily but part A still has me stuck at 60%.

[Anonymous]

Any more hints please? Is the cipher used in part a also used in one of the previous ciphers?

[Anonymous]

OFFICIAL HINT: you send in the exact decrypt for the EU part. Which should be a long series consisting of just 2 different letters. The converting to 2 colors part is to get the hidden meaning, but not what you submit.
Part a uses a substitution cipher.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by .

[Anonymous]

I agree with “Ember” on word being annoying to use for this purpose. Use textEdit on Mac or notepad on Windows, and it should be easier, as textEdit doesn’t try to do weird things with the formatting – if you do “make plain text” I believe it also sets it to a fixed-width font.

[Anonymous]

Its sunday evening and there is no clue???!?!?

HELP US, {snip}

[Anonymous]

@Overlord of Apple There are several official hints already on this forum, look back at these. It tells you the type of cipher and how to deal with the unusual middle part. If you don’t know how to decode this type of cipher then look it up on the resources page. Further hints will be published throughout the week.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by .

[Anonymous]

OFFICIAL HINT:
If you are still struggling on 5a, firstly you may notice (if you have done a frequency analysis on all of it except the U & E part) that it is not the same as for the English language, so it is not a transposition cipher, but is one where letters have been substituted for other letters. The frequency analysis should also still provide a few spikes, thus implying it is just a simple substitution cipher. Next you need to figure out which letter in the plain text has been mapped to which letter in the cipher text. One way to do this would be to use word & find & replace (where case matters) and use lower case letters for all the plain text. The fact that the word structure is intact, this should give you a good start.
e.g. All previous part A challenges have been letters between two of the three people Harry, Maryam and Jodie. See if any of these fit the characters at the start or end of part a. Once you have done this see if you can fill in any more letters through educated guesses and using cribs (words you expect to see). Also keep a track of what letters in the plain text have become what letters in the cipher text. Then you may be able to fill in some more.

Note usually after the keyword has been used (without repetition of repeated letters) you the use the rest of the alphabet in order, e.g. with the keyword hello (which becomes helo) you would end up with:
e.g.
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
H E L O P Q _ S T U _ _ _ _ _ A _ C _ _ _ I J K _ _

If you had the above, then you could start to look for letters which would fill in the gaps, because after the keyword, the rest of the alphabet is just used in order. So “q” must be “B”, as this is the only letter between A & C.

Read through all the other hints too for more help.

Good luck.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by .

[Anonymous]

I am stucknon it as well. The bit that is playingmy mind is what all the Es and Us stand for. Blimey! The people who encrypt these ciphers do have a lot of brain! ?
@JoanClarke your “tips” aren’t being much help. ?

[Anonymous]

this might be the wrong page to post on but the leader boards for challenge 4 are not up yet????

[Anonymous]

@CamillaChameleon Sorry for the delay, they will be up as soon as possible.

[Anonymous]

OFFICIAL HELP: As previously posted (with a few extra details added): Steganography is concealing a message somehow. Don’t do anything fancy when trying to decrypt the section of U’s and E’s. The sentence after the U and E’s tells you that yes, they are decoded to just 2 letters. For part a, you submit exactly what you decrypt here which is just a series of 2 letters and looks like nonsense. To get the hidden meaning which will give you the key word for part b, use those 2 letters and turn them into the colors they represent (or turn one into a space & leave the other as a letter in word). You also need to choose a font which gives each letter an equal width (like Courier New). Then you need to think where there may be line breaks to make an image appear. To figure out where line breaks may be look at the factors of the length of the U & E section of text (there are not many options). Go through this forum and check for all OFFICIAL HINTS and re-read them, maybe you’ll see something in it that you missed the first time. Good luck.

[Anonymous]

OFFICIAL HINT: If you want to see an example of steganography at work, check out the Official help for 5b forum page and the post by Deus scientiarum.
Hope you are all on track for completing this now. One more hint is that the keyword for part a is 5 letters long (this is for the substitution cipher).

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