3 ms·

I'm stuck on the first one. The "obvious" thing to do didn't work :-). Now I have no idea how to decode it. I guess that is the point? - do you need to be from

• jessehorne 7y ago
  I wouldn't say that you need a security background to answer the questions. I certainly don't. I would say more about the problems themselves but I'm scared it would give too much away. If you'd like, I could walk you through the first answer through email (you can find mine in my profile description). That may be enough to get you going. If not, I'd certainly be up for sharing how the rest are solved. I'm more than willing to do that because in this case if you aren't familiar with the type of problem you wouldn't even know where to begin "googling" to learn more.
  • mc3 7y ago
    Thanks for the offer. I'm OK not to know the answer, but thought I would give you feedback. The problem with these kind of puzzles is they reward luck to some extent. If you happen to try the thing that cracks the code you win. Otherwise you remain stuck. And there are no clues. Compared to real life software where you have a puzzle, you can't crack it, but you can apply debugging techniques and logically constrain the problem. I might change it to say something like "here is an encoded message, it has been encoded by (e.g.) replacing each letter A-Z consistently with another letter A-Z. Once decoded, you might want to use this regex to help you pick out the message. With that info I could go write a program to try and crack it and start thinking about how to solve the problem. The program itself could be part of the submission.