Hints Page for the Puzzle Handout.

The puzzle you are looking at is a type of Caesar Cipher. Julius Caesar used a Caesar Cipher to communicate with his generals. This cipher shifts all the letters a certain digits to the right or left. To decode the message, one reverses the process. The alphabet would wrap around the ends. You can learn more about Caesar Ciphers on Wikipedia.

Caesar used a right shift of 3. So if he wanted to communicate "cat," he would subtract 3 from each letter. C - 3 = Z; A - 3 = X; T - 3 = Q. The cipher text is then ZXQ. The recipient would then add 3 to each letter and would get "cat" as the plain text.

There are two cryptographic weakness. The first is that frequency analysis. For example, this cipher does nothing to hide the fact that the most common letters still remain the most common just with a different letter assigned to it. So whatever the most common letter is, might be e. This cipher also has the weakness that there are only 26 options to shift to thus a manageable size to calculate out all possible solutions. Only one output should provide understandable text.

The code in the puzzle is more complicated. Each column has a different shift and all are shifted to the right. Play with it and you should get plaintext.

Key is: Key: 20, 22, 11, 7, 17, 24, 4, 19, 23, 11, 18, 21, 16, 16, 10

A handy table to help

Good Luck.