Crypto Challenges -- You Can Do It

…so I just spent a good 20 minutes trying to run permutations of the file name “You can do it!” as the damned decryption key for the initial .zip file, thinking that was the challenge intended.

I am not a smart man.

This was made all the more interesting because that process managed to somehow produce a string that would actually unzip the file, albeit incorrectly. So there I am seeing that the file has unzipped with an error indicating that the CRC didn’t match what it should have, and that it was PROBABLY the wrong password. (For those curious, the string I found was “it can do you!”; whitespace and the exclamation point are necessary).

ANYWAY read the challenge description completely and don’t make your life harder than it has to be like I did

I’ve fallen for that at the beginning. The challenge was a nice little intro to crypto :slight_smile:

Somehow I saw the solution right away … I have no idea how or why, except I strongly sensed a pattern, and then I recalled something I had seen in a puzzles and codes book way back when I was a kid, tried it, and it worked. Now I want to go and find that book…