Prompt
Our analysts have obtained password dumps storing hacker passwords. It seems to be using a pretty simple encryption scheme, see if you can crack them.
Walk-Through
This challenge will give you experience decoding shift ciphers.
This message is encrypted using ROT-13, the standard Caesar Cipher. It is called ‘ROT’ because the letters of the alphabet are ‘rotated’. The ‘13’ indicates the number of letters are shifted; which is half of the alphabet. Therefore, ROT-13 is also considered a Caesar shift of 13.
Below, the inner loop of the wheel represents the plaintext while the outer loop represents the ciphertext of a ROT-13 shift. Often cipher disks like this were used to help manually decode ciphers.
A key feature of shift ciphers is that the ciphertext alphabet is in the same order as the plaintext alphabet, it’s just shifted. Shown below, the Plaintext is shifted by thirteen such that ‘A’ becomes ‘N’.
Plaintext: ABCDE FGHIJK LMNOP QRSTUV WXYZ
Ciphertext: NOPQR STUVWX YZABC DEFGHI JKLM
A Caesar shift can be decrypted by manually by matching ciphertext to possible plaintext letters, or by using online tools to make shifting through combinations faster.
Useful tools for decoding/encoding:
Questions
iveghny ynxr
This message can be decoded by hand or through an online tool such as Rot13 or CyberChef.
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