Classic, yet complicated!

I agree with those saying this one is underrated. I took a long route and didn’t have any help and it took a long time. I’ve only done a couple challenges so far, so maybe it’s easy relative to others? Fortunately I learned a lot and it was very satisfying to finally complete. But 10pts??

Hi all :slight_smile:

OK,i got it, it was funny

Perhaps the difficulty is in doing it the manual way. There are tools out there that can solve it instantly

Getting the plain text was fairly easy but for the love of God please someone help with the flag? Any advice or am I just stupid?

@DemiZe said:
Getting the plain text was fairly easy but for the love of God please someone help with the flag? Any advice or am I just stupid?

well, I guess I’m stupid lol

ahh i got it! defintely a classic! Have to give props to @likwidsec for the tip! :wink:

@JChris said:
Would you like some vinegar on your salad, sir?

This is hilarious… some people will end up thinking you’re on about the roman politician and military general’s lunch tho…

solved, nice challenge

Looking for a bit of help on this as I’ve “applied the vinegar” :smiley: but my resulting plain text has lots of errors. I can work out what the whole message is supposed to say, including where it tells me what the flag is but HTB doesn’t accept it. Difficult to say more without giving spoilers!

@poe said:
Looking for a bit of help on this as I’ve “applied the vinegar” :smiley: but my resulting plain text has lots of errors. I can work out what the whole message is supposed to say, including where it tells me what the flag is but HTB doesn’t accept it. Difficult to say more without giving spoilers!

Try rotation algorithm

@redlily said:

@poe said:
Looking for a bit of help on this as I’ve “applied the vinegar” :smiley: but my resulting plain text has lots of errors. I can work out what the whole message is supposed to say, including where it tells me what the flag is but HTB doesn’t accept it. Difficult to say more without giving spoilers!

Try rotation algorithm

Thank for the help! In the end it turns out I only had a partial key (exactly half) but because some of the letters of the first half match the letters in the second half and the two halves were equal lengths, about 80% of the cipher was being decrypted! :slight_smile:

Well, got the flag. This was easy once I figured out the correct key thanks to a hint in this thread. Still unsure how one would obtain that key without a hint, feel free to PM me if you know how to get it manually.

got it :slight_smile:

That was fun ! I did it by pen and paper and worked out the algorithm first. Although I don’t normally have it on my chips !

completed this challenge if need any help feel free to pm :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

@JChris said:
Would you like some vinegar on your salad, sir?

thats alot of help
thanks

I got this by just messing around and the hints in the forum completely gave it away for me. I’m just dipping my toe into crypto right now so I’m okay with the forum guiding me through a low-pointer or two, but I’d like to become more competent at this independently.

How would you approach this more systematically?

Edit: Aha, found a bunch of resources, including a book I read as a kid and this website: http://practicalcryptography.com .

Can someone please help me to get the key to decode the cipher… I understand that what type of cipher it is… but not able to get the key…

… Thanks …

I had a vague idea on the cipher method in use, but eventually I got the key by sheer luck lol.

This was a nice, refreshing challenge though. I’ve actually forgot about that cipher! It’s been too long since I’ve been to school.

Breaking the cipher in a systematic way seems like a tedious task. I wonder how people who solved it that way did it.