In June 2004 GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) created a codebreaking challenge which was placed on it’s website as a recruitment exercise. I visited it, as I’m interested in codebreaking and had attempted the cipher challenge placed by Simon Singh in his book The Code Book. But upon seeing the GCHQ challenge I discovered that it appeared to be trivially easy and not even worth the effort of attempting it. I wasn’t interested in getting employment with GCHQ as I suppose I am philosophically opposed to their work of intercepting and analysing communications. I align myself more with the ideals of cypherpunks so that was not a sufficient reason to waste my time solving the cryptograms.
I forgot all about it until a few days ago when following a conversation at work concerning Bletchley Park someone mentioned that GCHQ was running a codebreaking challenge on their website that if anyone was able to solve they would get a job there. At that point I had not recalled that I’d been to the website before so I decided to visit it again. Yet again I found that the challenge consisted of what appeared to be six trivially easy cryptograms that needed to be solved in order to find a secret word. There was however no mention of recruitment on the challenge page perhaps they were no longer recruiting.
The apparent ease of the task got me wondering as to its use as a recruitment tool, surely it wasn’t an effective measure of a potential candidate’s ability. It occurred to me that the challenge is little more than a PR exercise a way of raising the profile of the organisation and encouraging people to make job applications to it. The challenge acts as a filter to ensure applications only come from those individuals with at least modest ability and sufficient interest to crack the ciphers. In the intervening months I felt my attitude to GCHQ had changed perhaps due to having read Cliff Stoll’s book The Cuckoo’s Egg in which he encounters agents of the FBI, CIA and NSA who all turn out to be nice guys much to his surprise. I thought that employment with GCHQ might not be so bad, particularly if involved in securing computer systems and protecting them from hackers with the CESG (Communications-Electronics Security Group), which is a part of GCHQ. With that in mind I made a start on deciphering the cryptograms.
My text of the cryptogram solutions.
Having completed the deciphering the next task was to discover which books the passages of text were taken from to that end I called upon the services of Google. Whilst at Google I searched for more information on the challenge and discovered that the solutions to the six cryptograms had been posted on many websites already and there had been a Daily Telegraph article about it. The Telegraph article explains that GCHQ has been foiled by the power of the internet and has had the solution to its fiendishly difficult challenge placed online.
If the purpose of the challenge was to create a fiendishly difficult challenge to discover untapped codebreaking genius then GCHQ failed before they even began which is why I don’t believe that was the purpose. The publishing of the solutions may have caused GCHQ to be flooded with emails detailing the solution which is why there is no information on the challenge page about recruitment. GCHQ themselves are due to publish the solutions tomorrow Wednesday 15th September.
In any case when I heard of the challenge I was hoping for something along the lines of the Cipher Challenge in the back of The Code Book or the following one used in question 9 of the Test for Exceptional Intelligence compiled by the International High IQ Society.
AFFDXVXAAAGXXDF
XXFGGAFAFAGGXFG
AAXAAXXFXXFFFGG
AFXGGVGGAFFAAFG
VGGAXFXGXXFFAAF
XDFFFAVFDXFDDXF
Deciphering this cryptogram will reveal that the eighth word of the plaintext is DEATH.
Tags: cryptography, security
