[Challenge]: Nobody's solved this yet, can you?

Last week I posted a little cryptic challenge. It's been exactly a week and nobody has solved it yet. Maybe you can!!

If you haven't checked it yet, go give it a try!

[Challenge]: Cryptic riddle, can you solve it? 🧐

Keff ・ Nov 10

#watercooler #challenge #puzzle #fun

If you checked it but couldn't figure it out, I will share a clue in the comments of this post, hopefully that helps a bit :)

Comments

[Paweł bbkr Pabian]

I'm stuck.

• ASCII message with correct punctuation suggests some kind of early character based encryption (not full binary encryption).
• Blaise search pops up two famous people - Pascal and Vigenère.
• Vigenere is known for Vigenere cipher, but that does not quite match because he is not the real author of this cipher and his wife was Marie Vare not Marie Ann.
• Marie Ann (as a person) search returns only a lot of social profiles noise, nothing famous or characteristic.

Following Vigenere cipher clue anyway:

• There is very characteristic jcp'zs, in English there are very few apostrophed sequences that matches: we're, you're, she'll, you've. That allows to reverse engineer possible part of the key (Raku code):

sub find-offset( $from, $to ) {

    my $offset = $to.ord - $from.ord;
    $offset += 26 if $offset < 0;

    return ('a'..'z')[ $offset ];
}

for 'youve'.comb Z 'jcpzs'.comb -> ( $from, $to ) {
    say find-offset( $from, $to );
}

which gives most probably phrase loveo.

• Using hint within these pages, the answer is by letter numbers it appears phrase The answer is is literally directly before quoted text, and that allows to reverse more key giving ingloveof. Which kind of confirms loveo.

And now I'm out of ideas :) I can try to brute force check all 15 letter words for first word in encrypted message to see if they give reasonable part of the key but that kind of looks ugly and I have a feeling I missed some important reference here.

[Keff]

cool, I thought it might be too easy!!! you're kinda close, here are a couple more clues:

the first and second paragraphs tell you what
the fourth tells you where and how
the fifth, again, hints at what

he got the name though
love is indeed involved

this clue is also important

if the clues are still not enough, please let me know and I will provide more

[Paweł bbkr Pabian]

Solved it: gist.github.com/bbkr/4ad9a1e00872e...

I must say it was difficult and sometimes misleading (explained in Gist). Without partial key decoding it would be dead end for me. I suggest changing word "ancient" to "classic" in riddle text, because from the beginning your abstract use of term "ancient" can derail thouhgt process.

Thanks for the riddle!

[Keff]

I'm glad you enjoyed it!! I will update the riddle.

[Keff]

Thanks for the gist, this will help me in future riddles/puzzles...

[Keff]

page left intentionally blank

what is she for him?