Challenge #159: April ENcyptanalytics

[Kenda]

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Why do small things that cause a lot of grief like this always happen to me? I built out my whole workflow and ran it only to find out it failed when passing through the macro. So I redid basically everything only to realize the only reason it was failing was because I created my own Text Input file that I called Field1 when the macro was expecting a field called data. *facepalm* 

[jamielaird]

Here's my solution

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I created a dictionary of ~800 UTF-8 characters and performed a random character substitution for half of the letters in the string. With 10 differently encoded versions of the original text it can be cracked easily using the decoder.

[LordNeilLord]

13

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[RWvanLeeuwen]

My 1000 record long input:

And my workflow to get there:

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[SeanAdams]

Very different kind of challenge - thank you @TerryT 

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Solution was to split into characters; then add a random offset on the char ID; but for 1 in 10 of these set the offset to 0; then use a mod function to bring this back to the 1-160 range.

Added the 155 challenge decoder as a macro to check this.

[TimHuff]

All the special sauce is in the Python tool.

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[TimothyManning]

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Cool Challenge!

[TonyA]

This one was a lot of fun. 

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I assumed that the number of rows would be equal to the number of characters in the message. I played a bit with the sampling rate (what percentage of the values to hold at the original value) just to see when the encoding would start to break. For this 70 character example, I started getting random errors at less than 25% sampling. I'm sure this would change based on the number of rows of encoding. 

[Karam]

Solution attached.

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[nivi_s]

Challenge #159 Solved!

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