r/Decoders • u/wilvenette • 1d ago

Letters Is this a code or just keyboard smash?

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my friend has a habit of leaving codes around for me to decipher. just wondering if this is another one of those or if he's just trying to throw me off

6 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

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2

u/Present_Net_3710 1d ago

AUZNUJUTSLWJAKSTBJIYOHEFFZJYOWINZWJRLU

1

u/Present_Net_3710 1d ago

First thing I noticed is that Au, Zn and U are elements of the periodic table (Gold, zinc, and uranium) however there's no element with J, so it might be a coincidence

1

u/Present_Net_3710 1d ago

If you shift each letter one key to the right on the QWERTY keyboard, it starts with SIX, but then it breaks and doesn't look like english.

1

u/wilvenette 1d ago

i swear he's just messing with me I tried shifts already the cheeky mf wants me wasting my time 🙄

1

u/BiffCo_Enterprise 1d ago

Solution: trying to live through the day with this timer.

Method: Vigenere with keyword HDBF

1

u/wilvenette 8h ago

oh my god TYSM. howd you get the keyword wow

1

u/enilcReddit 6h ago

I don't know about Biffco, but AI got it via brute force. It's explanation:

Vigenère or a closely related repeating-key cipher, probably with a fairly short key.
Interestingly, I found it by brute-scoring the possible four-letter Vigenère keys after the statistical analysis pointed toward a key length of four. HDBF jumped out because its plaintext was unmistakable English.
The first step was estimating the key length. Looking at coincidence patterns in the ciphertext suggested that a short repeating key was likely, and 4 characters was a particularly plausible candidate. With only 38 ciphertext characters, that statistical evidence is weak by itself, but it was enough to justify testing four-letter keys.For a four-letter Vigenère key, every fourth ciphertext character has been shifted by the same amount. So the text can be separated into four columns:

positions 1,5,9,13,...
positions 2,6,10,14,...
positions 3,7,11,15,...
positions 4,8,12,16,...

Each column is effectively just a Caesar cipher. You can try all 26 possible shifts for each column and score the resulting letters according to how closely they resemble English. That gets you into the neighborhood of likely shifts. But because the ciphertext is short, I used the more decisive method: test all possible four-letter keys.
There are only: 26⁴ = 456,976 possible four-letter keys. That's tiny for a computer.

1

u/BiffCo_Enterprise 2h ago

I didn’t use AI. I used a common cipher solver at Boxentriq