Crack the Code
This is an emergency class. Every second counts! Aqua8 intercepted an encrypted note. We suspect that it was written by anti-government insurgents that threaten our illustrious Governor.
Aqua8 asked us help them decipher the writing. It takes a mathematician’s logical approach to solve this riddle. Now sit down and let’s see if you’ve got what it takes to crack these codes.
Need some help? I suppose they don’t really teach cryptography down in the Valley. So listen up: The government has already downloaded this cipher key onto your e-pad. You just have to fill it out. This is top secret, so you will need a pen and paper. Electronics can be hacked.
Need a hint?
Highlight to read the clues.
Clue 1: Focus on the short words, like ‘a’ ‘the’ ‘and’ they’re easier to crack
Clue 2: It’s from the forbidden past so you might encounter some unusual words
Clue 3: It’s in poetical format so it has an unusual sentence structure.
Clue 4: The author is William Shakespeare. The source is: A Midsummer night’s dream. A guy called Oberon is speaking
Solution:
Highlight to read:
​
My gentle Puck, come hither.
Thou rememberest since

Once I sat upon a promontory,

And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back

Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath

That the rude sea grew civil at her song,

And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,

To hear the sea-maid's music?
​
Well done if you worked it out!
Keep your eyes open for more messages.
Class Dismissed!
Cryptography
Want to know more about Cryptography?
Cryptography is a collective term for anything involving secret writing and hiding messages. Encryption is more specific. It’s when you transform regular writing into a ciphertext.
Encryption was already used 4,000 years ago in ancient Egypt and Greece. The Spartans had an invention called the ‘scytale’.
A scytale works by winding a strip of leather (or parchment) around a cylindar, then writing a message along it. Once the strip was wound off the cylinder, the text became unreadable.
Unless, of course, the recipient had a cylinder of the same diameter on which to wrap the strip in order to read the message.
Spartans were not the only ones who used encryption. A nobleman called Khnumhotep II even used coded hieroglyphs for the text that would be placed upon his tomb so that only a select few could read the story of his life.
As if hieroglyphs are not already difficult enough to read!
They were only deciphered with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is an ancient slab of stone that acts like a giant, big cipher key. It lists the same text in three different languages and scripts: Greek, Hieroglyphs and Demotic (the writing that Egyptians used in their daily lives). It was discovered by French soldiers in 1799 during Napoleon’s Egypt campaign. When it was found archaeologists were finally able to work out how to read hieroglyphs.
​
But that’s now all. Did you know that the Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilisation remains undeciphered to this day? The messages are too few and two short for anyone to make out the meaning. So for those future Indiana Joneses and Lara Crofts among you, there’s a challenge, right?
Back to more modern days though: Encryption changed drastically with the arrival of computers. If you’ve watched a movie called ‘The Imitation Game’ (2014) you’ll know all about the Enigma machine already. During the second world war, German electrical engineer Arthur Scherbius invented a rotor-and-gear based machine, the mechanical cipher Enigma machine. It allowed the German to send secret messages to each other. Cracking the code would have required trying around 17,000 different combinations within 24 hours. It was only when Alan Turing, a brilliant British mathematician, invented the forerunner to the modern computer that the code could be cracked.
​
Sources:
https://mathcenter.oxford.emory.edu/site/math125/transpositionCiphers/
https://tresorit.com/blog/the-history-of-encryption-the-roots-of-modern-day-cyber-security/#:~:text=The first recorded instance of,to be sent and received.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-alan-turing-cracked-the-enigma-code
https://www.dw.com/en/rosetta-stone-deciphering-mysterious-egyptian-hieroglyphs/a-63268251
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17012-scholars-at-odds-over-mysterious-indus-script/
Class Dismissed!