Geocache placed with permission from James W. Robinson Secondary School(Fairfax County Public Schools). Please only search for geocache during daylight hours.
Welcome back to the "Cryptocache Challenge!" This challenge will put your cryptological, mathematical, and geocaching skills to the test. This challenge contains a series of eight geocaches hidden at different locations around Fairfax. Each geocache contains an encrypted message in its description. Each geocache also uses a different cryptosystem. It is recommended to find the first geocache of this series and go in order and find the seventh geocache second to last because the difficulty of decrypting the messages increase. The eighth geocache will be found last because the first seven are required to be found first because they contain information that will be used to find the eighth geocache. Are you up to the challenge? If so, good luck!
For this geocache, you will need to use the ADFGVX Cipher to decrypt the message below. Also, check the ADFGVX Cipher table that’s used to decrypt the message in the photos. The keyword is the same as the previous geocache.
ADXDDAFADDDAFDDGGXDGFGXFAGGFADAVVFFDAXVXGDGXGFDXVVXXGDFGXXFG
XAFDADDGDGAXDGVFGDDDDGGDFADVFA
Once you've decrypted the message, you should get numbers. Use the diagram below and put the correct numbers in each box.
N ▢▢º ▢▢.▢▢▢’
W ▢▢º ▢▢.▢▢▢’
If you need a little help, here's a link.
http://practicalcryptography.com/ciphers/adfgvx-cipher/
When going to find the geocache, you might need to bring some tweezers because the logbook can be tricky to remove from the container.
There's also something called a "special character" in the logbook located under the "FTF" text in the logbook. A special character is either a letter or a number and they will be used to decrypt the eighth geocache's message. So don't forget to take a picture of that to remember! If you find the geocache and have trouble reading or making out what the secret character is, message me for the character with a picture of the geocache's location as proof.
Nominated for NOVAGO's 2020
Best Theme/Series
