Enigma Two (2022)

 

On the menu this week: ciphers.  We started with ancient versions and worked our way up to basic machine cryptograms.  You did know why the course is called Enigma, didn't you?

The Julian cipher is one of the oldest known ones.  Helpful if you only wanted to have your message safe from the eyes of smelly barbarians who might waylay a courier.  Heck, you might decide to send a special message just to punk 'em a bit.....

Of course Julius Caesar would have framed it a bit differently.  Here's the follow up cipher....

OLFACIES VERE MALUM

To their credit they were able to pick the actual message out of the random strings generated by this method of cipher breaking.  And they called it as a foreign language.  They guessed French, which is closer than you might think, Greek, which one kid say could not be the case as they had different letters, and finally "Roman".  I did have to give them credit for that but of course it is Latin.  

Then I asked them to translate it.  They got MALUM pretty easily after I told them to go through a dozen words with the Mal prefix.  VERE has not changed much at all, and OLFACIES made sense since it was basically the same message as before just the way a Roman would have actually written it.

We had a run at breaking random ciphers with character analysis but their brains were too fried.  Its the run up to Homecoming this week and Halloween shortly so you have to make allowances.  The final question did provide me with a good ten minutes of entertainment as I assured them that the paper they found hidden under a chair cushion actually did contain the combination that opened the snack safe.  Really.  They just had to ask the right follow up questions.....

XFGGRRFM !