Current Case Files

Case File 0.1

Nothing to see here yet, but keep your eye on this page, it is where we will post extra clues and hints to help explain the story and help you to crack the challenges.

The document in part A is a letter from Francois to Sarah, posted in reply to her questions about the broken photographic plate. It is lightly encrypted and if you look you can see that Francois has left the word shapes in place, which makes it easy to start to see patterns. There are a lot of three letter words of the form FTQ for example, and that is a very big clue! (Which three letter word appears most often in English text?)

Part B is made much trickier by the lack of word shapes, but you can use the same trick as you did for part A and look for common three letter strings to try and crack this cipher. It is another Caesar shift, so should be straightforward. Even better, just knowing the most likely common letter in English should be enough, and you can look that up in the Cryptanalyst handbook in the library.