Enigma Series - 2 - ZigZag Mystery Cache
Enigma Series - 2 - ZigZag
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(regular)
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Co-ordinates are for the neaby car park, you will need to walk for about 5 minutes from this location.
This is the second in the ENIGMA series by Baldy_Bazzer. The cache can be found by decrypting the ZIGZAG coded message:
nrhitoeereffyeedcmlnfvsvneteoeretitedcmleoieeootffyndgesitsvneiaoeieeewszrdgeshreneiazrnnzr
Introduction:
This is a series of 25+ goecaches which I am deploying, the theme is codes, ciphers and cryptology. My inspiration comes from the Enigma machine, used by the German military during World War II and the efforts taken by the Polish, British and other allies to break the German secret codes used for military communications. It is widely believed that breaking Enigma shortened World War II by apporximately 2 years. Imagine if that did not happen, we would either be speaking German now or dead under a nuclear cloud....a sobering thought. This series of caches starts with simple codes and ciphers and moves forward to Enigma and state-of-the-art cryptology. If you like this series then I suggest two things: (1) Visit Bletchley Park (www.bletchleypark.org.uk) and (2) Read the book which I found most interesting: "The Code Book" by Simon Singh.
Bletchley Park employed 12,000 personnel at it's peak with everyone sworn to absolute secrecy until 1972, incredible that not once did the Germans suspect such an intelligence operation was ongoing in UK, even the top ranking British military were not aware of it's capabiliites, only Winston Churchil himself. Military commanders were fed information by miltary liasion officers that came from tangeable "second sources" such as spies, prisoner interrogations, etc. It was so important that Churchill signed a warrant stating Bletchley Park would get all resources necessary above and beyond any other cause during World War II!!
When most people talk about "secret codes" they quite often mean "secret ciphers". A few words to explain some commonly used terms:
Steganography - hiding or concealing a message.
Cryptography - scrambling a message.
Transpostion - shifting the cipher characters.
Substitution - replacing pieces of the message with other characters.
Code - replacing or substituting words.
Cipher - replacing or substituting letters.
This geocache is going to use the ZIGZAG method of cryptology. Her we take a message and split alternate characters onto two lines. Then we add those lines back together. To decrypt you just work out the length of the message, split it into two halves and seperate into two lines, then add the letters back together alterating betwen the lines. A simple example is here:
The original message is: "Baldy Bazzer likes geocaching"
Split into two lines, alternating the characters:
Line 1 = Blyazriegoahn
Line 2 = adBzelkseccig
Encrypted message = BlyazriegoahnadBzelkseccig
Decrypted message is simply a reversal of this procedure.
The cache can be found by decrypting the ZIGZAG coded message:
nrhitoeereffyeedcmlnfvsvneteoeretitedcmleoieeootffyndgesitsvneiaoeieeewszrdgeshreneiazrnnzr
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Hc va gur ynetr ebggvat gerr gehax, gur fvqr pybfrfg gb gur ebnq.