A Retired Spy's Musings

[Anonymous]

Evening all,

Having retired from this game a couple of years ago, and now being firmly out of the picture, I think it’s finally time to write up a few of my notes (albeit a year later than I promised) whilst sitting here drinking tea and looking over the skyline of my new city.

I have seen so much change over these past REDACTED years, and been taken on many adventures, from finding the Mona Lisa, combating piracy through to grand conspiracies, though nothing quite beats randomly meeting another person from here in a coffee shop.

Though enough with the nostalgia.

Some advice for you fresh blood: (Though take it with more than a pinch of salt)

The enemy is always predictable to start with – at least from my experience, as why waste time and resources on a complex cipher when no one even knows there is a message out there that needs to be protected?

Harry has lots of friends in lots of places, and he likes to keep contact with them all, through letters usually. It’s nice to see the old ways still being used.

Cribs are your best friend – known phrases in the plain text. This was the way enigma was broken, and I’ve personally found the phrase “Heil Hitler” useful to solve a set of ciphers.

Although not as straight forward as cribs, frequency analysis (of individual letters and of bigrams and maybe even trigrams) can be very useful. Look up / have to hand the most popular ones (and maybe even the percentages of them) and learn the patters for the distributions.

Learn the merits of a good cup of tea – a 5 minute break for a brew can do wonders at times.

Brainstorm some ideas of what ciphers may turn up – and some potential keywords. The weakest bit of any cipher is the human – we have a tendency to pick memorable passwords – which can also be easily guessable.

Finally, get lucky. You can try a hundred valid options and none of them pan out or you might get it first try. Actually forget luck, persevere and you will get there.

There are definitely bits I have forgotten, and bits I don’t know, but if anything comes to me I will write more, or please ask any questions – though I can’t guarantee how quickly I will reply, but hopefully this might give some of you some ideas/pointers.

Anyway supper is calling,
Yours,
OP

P.S. G? I don’t know if this will find you, but I enjoyed the hot chocolate, everything is looking good on this end. What about you? S.

[Anonymous]

Ummm thanks! Hope you enjoy your new city

[Anonymous]

Thanks, and I’m starting to think I’ve not taken part for a longer time than I thought…..

[Author]

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