Contest: CRYPTANALYSIS
Hello friends of Steem kids and parents, I am always elated whenever I get to see contest about puzzles, deciphering and the likes and this one was not different.
I came across the CRYPTANALYSIS contest by @manuelhooks, and I was excited seeing such a lovely post and this is how the journey has been in the last 6 days.
Before seeing his post, I have never heard of the word pigpen cipher before, in fact it was after I decoded the first message that I got to read about it.
The main message is very difficult because I have been unable to get all the keys but I still have to attempt something. After a lot of attempts, I felt frustrated and sometimes I will sleep with the paper I was used in decoding it.
Sometimes it was funny, even my friends at work laughed at me during break time because of how frustrating I looked.
I am a type of person that loves finding solutions to puzzles, crosswords etc and I had to give this a try
First Message
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Like I said before, I hadn't known about pigpen cipher before cracking the first message..I looked out for loopholes that could help me get some letters of the alphabets..I used that to get all the words in the first message and the message reads thus:
THE MAIN MESSAGE BELOW IS ENCRYPTED WITH AN EXTENDED PIGPEN CYPHER AND IS PROTECTED BY A KEY FOR DECIPHERING THIS SEGMENT CORRECTLY, YOUR REWARD IS 10 STEEM FOR MAKING A DETAILED EXPLANATION,
THE REWARD TO PARTICIPANTS SHALL BE IN A RATIO OF 5:3:2 STEEM POWER.
NOW SOLVE THE MAIN MESSAGE BELOW AND GET FIFTY STEEM REWARD
The picture above will help with the explanation below:
The pigpen cipher uses special symbols to represent letters.
The first grid (3 columns and three rows) represents letters A to I.
The second grid which has dots, represents letters from J to R.
The first X symbol represents letters from S to V and the last X symbol with dots represents letters from W to Z.
With this the pigpen cipher is constructed, each letter being represented by the symbol it occupies.
MAIN MESSAGE
The main message is kind of skewed because I couldn't get the key to decipher it. Well I did my best to get a few words and I hope I can get some it. Just like the first one, I tried getting some letters of the alphabets and well this is all I could get;
FUR CRAVING KISS JOKE YOU STEEL GATE A TOTAL OF FIFTY STEEMS.
I know some of the words aren't correct but I still have to make an attempt.
Thank you for going through my post.
I invite @imohmitch, @onlyonefave and @davidmarkgeorge to participate in this contest.