[Wolves] Coder breaking

[Peter Evans]

On Thursday 30 November 2006 13:10, baza wrote:
> i said it was a first-order encryption (each plaintext
> letter has only one cipher equivalent) and i certainly wouldn't post
> indecipherable material here.
>
> the only dirty trick i played was running the digits together - but you
> seem to be more than halfway to working out how to deal with that.
>
> anyway, this is what the first word would look like properly spaced:
>
> 8 22 6 20 14 3 5
>
> this should nearly tell you what the range of the cipher is
> (congratulations on your hypotheses so far)."

Baza,

Is the above the quote you got from the person posting the problem?  I have to 
ask because I'm not sure where your text finished and the quote began.

Is there more context to this that you are willing to share with us, in 
particular I'd like to know what the last sentence relates to.

Perhaps the talk of a Caesar cipher has been a bit of a 
mistake on our part.  My assumption now is that it's a 'simple substitution 
cipher' (my interpretation about each plaintext having only one ciphertext 
equivalent rules out a one-time pad), so the key length is 26!, on the 
assumption that the alphabet is a..z (or A..Z, whichever).

Providing us with information about the first word tells us that it's seven 
letters with no letter repeated.  I did a little research ( on 
http://www.morewords.com/unique-letters/ ) it shows at least 7694 words in 
the English language that fits this description.

It's still a pretty tall order to brute-force or dictionary attack this one 
even with the information provided.  And generating and reading all the 
possible combinations that result is beyond my enthusiasm at the moment, not 
to mention ability.

Additionally by converting the digits to numbers and collapsing them I think 
there's been some uncertainty added into the ciphertext.  There are three 
occasions when three digit sequences cannot be separated by the application 
of a deterministic rule (225 occurs twice and 224 once) these could represent 
one of two different character or a three character combination (225 could be 
22, 5 or 2, 25 or 2, 2, 5).  Even with the correct key the plain text could 
have been one of three possible inputs, although only one may make 
actual 'sense'.
-- 
Regards,

Pete Evans