Thank you to everyone who joined in this year’s National Cipher Challenge. It has been amazing to see so many of you do so well, and we hope you enjoyed the challenges and the opportunity to follow Jodie on her London adventures.

It has been an incredible year, with 7341 of you registered to take part and a record breaking number making it to the end. We will be contacting potential winners in the next couple of days to verify eligibility, and will make an announcement here next week. As a bonus we will also be posting a new challenge using the new and subtle Hutton cipher, which was designed by Eric Bond Hutton. It is closely related to the cipher we used for Challenge 10B (a keyed version of the Vigenere cipher) with a nasty twist. I don’t know of anyone who has cracked a Hutton cipher, so if you can do it you could make quite a name for yourself. No prizes for that bonus challenge, and no deadlines either, but if you work out a way to tackle it you might want to try to find Eric’s own challenge online. I haven’t looked recently, but he used to be offering $1000 to anyone who could break it. We will be asking our winners to give you some insight into how they cracked Challenge 10B so maybe that will help.

We will be organising a prize giving at Bletchley Park for later in the spring, and will post the details here and on Twitter so do keep an eye out.

It will take a while for the dust to settle on The Kompromat Files, but when it does the elves will be clearing out the website, and yes, we will be back for Cipher Challenge 2019 next Autumn! You may get a reminder about that before we delete all the user accounts, and we hope you won’t mind receiving a request for feedback on the competition too. Please feel free to delete it if you are not interested.

As usual it has been a pleasure to spend a few months exploring the world of codes and ciphers with you, I hope you will want to come back. Have a good year,

Harry

Three challenges to go (8,9 and 10) and we still have loads of you on board. So far you have cracked Caesar shifts, substitution ciphers, some with little twists, and some devious transposition ciphers. Who knows what Douglas and Jodie have in store next!

Challenge 8 is the last challenge with a Friday night deadline for the first time band. For Challenge 9 you will find the time bands are now live. The maximum points for that Challenge will only be available until Midnight Thursday, so try to put some time aside to give it a go.

As a ‘heads up” the first time band for Challenge 10 in two weeks’ time will end at 8pm on the Thursday, and we will use “fastest first” in Challenge 10 as the tie breaker for the overall championship.

Good luck!

Harry

Well done everyone for their work on the practice challenges, it has been amazing to see so many of you do so well. We have over 7,000 competitors registered and gearing up for the competition proper, which goes live with the first Competition Challenge (Challenge 4) at 3pm this afternoon.

As usual you have quite a bit of time before the first points deadline (midnight Friday) so don’t panic if you can’t get to the Challenge when it launches, or if you think you have made a mistake. You can resubmit any time up to the points deadline without losing marks, and we will release feedback after the first points deadline so if you don’t spot an error on your own you can still get high marks.

The Challenge 3 leader board is live now, and we will start the overall leader board with the results from Challenge 4 next Thursday! Don’t forget to collect your certificates for the first three challenges though!

Good luck,

The Leader Board is up and Challenge 2 is about to go live, so it has been an action packed day at Cipher Challenge central. We have over competitors and over a 1200 teams took part in the first Practice Round. Challenge 2 is also for practice, so give it a go and see how you get on. You might find out a little more about Jodie and her mysterious correspondent. You might even find out the significance of the missing letter “r” in Challenge 1!

Congratulations to everyone who took part in the first round. You should be able to download a certificate recording your achievement from your account area.

One more thing, when publishing the leaderboard we did notice one or two slightly sketchy team names. We have contacted team captains where we can, but if you think that your team name might cause any offence please do go back and think about changing it. Let us know if you need help.

Best wishes and Good Luck for this week!

Harry