unknown cipher

number13 · March 2019

so, truly not pressing... but i'm in a game with some friends and we were given a cipher to solve. while it looks (?) like a normal substitution cipher i have no idea what the key is? but then i'm no good at these so don't take my word for it. if anyone has any ideas though, i'd appreciate it!

edit: so apparently the initial code was wrong. and while it is for sure a double transposition cipher (with unknown keywords), the new (and presumably correct) cipher is

HCEWNOSERMINLEMHETTETHONHITKWLLIEMCODMCANTOCTWITHOTMECSERTEAHIGEBORHOOD

ceres · March 2019

It could be, but also looks like it could just be scrambled?

edit: I plugged the whole thing into Google just to see what would come up and I think I may be on some lists now. Maybe don't google it.

number13 · March 2019

ceres wrote: »

It could be, but also looks like it could just be scrambled?

edit: I plugged the whole thing into Google just to see what would come up and I think I may be on some lists now. Maybe don't google it.

lol TAKEN INTO ADVISEMENT. i also considered a scramble but she specifically mentioned using a cipher type so i'm not sure. entirely possible though!

Darkewolfe · March 2019

Since I don't want to ruin your fun, I suggest you just play with ciphers. This is one of the better resources.

http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/

number13 · March 2019

yeah i've been looking there actually, thanks for the suggestion! i'm uh... TOTALLY okay with spoilers lol. i've been at this for way too long.

if you want you could let me know what cipher is actually being used and/or spoiler the answer so i only look at it when i'm at my wits end?

Richy · March 2019

The punctuation signs and capital letters at odd positions certainly make it look scrambled. But I tried feeding some of the strings into a Scrabble Word Finder and came up empty.

If it's a cipher, I see two single-letter words, c and h. There are only two single-letter words in English, a and i. So you have two match-up possibilities to begin. There are three OR FOUR double-letters as well: oo, ee, mm, and iI (if lower-case and upper-case map to the same original letter) that would have limited choices as well.

number13 · March 2019

yeah, i'm looking at crypto corner and i also used cryptobreak to try to at least narrow down the type of cipher used, and i think that it might be a double transposition cipher.

dispatch.o · March 2019

Well now I have something to hard stare at all day at work. Super.

number13 · March 2019

dispatch.o wrote: »

Well now I have something to hard stare at all day at work. Super.

it haunts my waking moments

ceres · March 2019

I was up till 1:30am thinking about this and I am displeased.

number13 · March 2019

if it helps, it's a little messenger silent hill based game. there was a note that accompanied the cipher:

"On the altar at the center of the church, it’s clear someone has been there recently. The smell of burning incense lingers in the air, and the stubs of it are still in a bowl on the altar, along with a reed, a snakeskin, and a flower with white blossoms and oblong leaves, the same flower that grows in abundance on the lake shore. There’s a note left in the bowl, From your loving devotee."

and an additional note found by character investigation that reads:

"It seems shoved in one of the corners of the pews is a scrap of notepaper someone was scribbling on.

Morning prayers done kneeling on gravel to imagine God's suffering

Reflect on God's sacrifice

Remember to meet Wolfhound at six to make delivery

Bruises are God's kisses???

Offerings to God should always have reeds and snakes

(Real snakes? Priest says representations are fine and not to let loose live snakes in church)

Keep better track of your notes!!!"

if you're familiar at all with silent hill this helps narrow down the key words but none of the combinations i've tried have worked. but an additional hint that was given is that the key words are referenced in both notes.

ceres · March 2019

Bruises are God's kisses wtf

Can I get a list of relevant place names?

Daenris · March 2019

number13 wrote: »

if it helps, it's a little messenger silent hill based game. there was a note that accompanied the cipher:

"On the altar at the center of the church, it’s clear someone has been there recently. The smell of burning incense lingers in the air, and the stubs of it are still in a bowl on the altar, along with a reed, a snakeskin, and a flower with white blossoms and oblong leaves, the same flower that grows in abundance on the lake shore. There’s a note left in the bowl, From your loving devotee."

and an additional note found by character investigation that reads:

"It seems shoved in one of the corners of the pews is a scrap of notepaper someone was scribbling on.

Morning prayers done kneeling on gravel to imagine God's suffering

Reflect on God's sacrifice

Remember to meet Wolfhound at six to make delivery

Bruises are God's kisses???

Offerings to God should always have reeds and snakes

(Real snakes? Priest says representations are fine and not to let loose live snakes in church)

Keep better track of your notes!!!"

if you're familiar at all with silent hill this helps narrow down the key words but none of the combinations i've tried have worked. but an additional hint that was given is that the key words are referenced in both notes.

In both notes specifically, or just in both bits of information? Because from this it looks like the first note is just "From your loving devotee" which doesn't leave a lot of room for two keyword references (unless 1 keyword is referenced in each note).

Fry · March 2019

number13 wrote: »

HCEWNOSERMINLEMHETTETHONHITKWLLIEMCODMCANTOCTWITHOTMECSERTEAHIGEBORHOOD

Looking at this string with my human eyeballs, my brain says the words "Willamette" and "Neighborhood" are in there. Clearly there is a Dead Rising crossover going on

ceres · March 2019

See jumping out at me initially was blah blah blah blah "code can't act without me" blah "neighborhood." But that's not really a cipher, it's a glance. And "reeds" and "snakes" jump out from both sets of info, though I have no idea what you'd do with those words in the cipher.

bowen · March 2019

This particular one looks like a scramble or letters were dropped because of how many word and word-like chunks there are.

borhood without the neigh, "withot" without its u (and no extra U to be found)

ceres · March 2019

Every time I take what it looks like and try to make a pattern it falls apart.

number13 · March 2019

in a double transposition cipher the keywords are essentially used to jumble the cipher text. so, if reeds were one, you would number the letters in the word "reeds" in alphabetical order, and then break the cipher text down by letter in a grid moving down in a row. but then in a double transposition you would take the jumbled cipher and then do it AGAIN with a SECOND keyword.

and yeah, i tried any combination of reeds and serpents and claudia (the flower). i was thinking the 'loving devotee' was claudia wolf, and that maybe that would mean claudia is mentioned in both notes (wolfhound?), but nothing has worked for me so far.

you can kind of get a sense of the lore on the wiki, but it essentially boils down to an adam and eve-esque story where the world was perpetually suffering, and a man and a woman offered a snake and a reed in prayer for joy and salvation and gave birth to god. the note was also found in the lutheran church with the halo of the sun and also the paintings of god, which you'll see in the myth portion of the god wiki.

Darkewolfe · March 2019

It's very likely a keyed vigenere cipher, or some variant.

ceres · March 2019

So this is an actual Silent Hill game, and not just from a game like it? For some reason that's how I read the post so I didn't think Silent Hill stuff would help me.

Also I have never played Silent Hill.

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