http://www.krys04204.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/billsyearbook.jpg

This was a yearbook entry from one of my friends from school. I have
been unable to crack the numerical code and small letters. So far,
from previous knowledge, i have found the Large lettered code Knowing
that his email address is sequorathotmaildotcom and his address is
twentyeightvictoriaroad i could work the rest out. As for the numbers
i know his birthday is 16 of April 1986. I am led to believe the
smaller letters are not only coded but coded in Latin. The creator of
the code said frequency analysis shouldn't be required.

My Question is what does the rest of the code say? (that is small
letters and numbers) and how did you work it out?

---

Request for Question Clarification by pinkfreud-ga on 08 Feb 2005 17:27 PST

UT LITTERIS HUMANIORIBUS STUDEAM is indeed Latin, if that helps.

---

Clarification of Question by foxmccloud-ga on 09 Feb 2005 06:14 PST

Thank you from this i have gotten, assuming that studeo takes the
dative it means "so that I may study more cultured letters" but
litterae humaniores is also the name of the oxford classics course. I
think he means to say "so that I may study [a very pretentious way of
saying classics]" which is what he is studying at Oxford currently.

First of all... why do you care? If he is your "friend" you would
already know everything you need to know about him. By his use of the
term "frequency analysis" it implies that he probably is using a
simple substitution encryption. To start try counting the frequency of
how often a particular letter occurs in the cypher. Once you find the
highest frequency assume that is the english letter "e". Then your on
your own after that.

There are things i don't even know about myself let alone my friends.
I know 3 words to sum him up but not his 3 words. Besides why would he
have coded it if it was pointless?  I don't think you read the
question very well. It is most likely coded in latin and so it's
almost as likely to be an I as it is to be an E and he said "frequency
analysis" wasn't needed. I've used simple decryption methods and they
have proved fruitless. That is why i have come to the experts. I
already know his telephone number but i want to know how it was coded
as goes with the second part of my question not simply what it says.
Any contributions would be much appreciated.

You said he said: "frequency analysis [shouldn't] be required". To my
suspicous mind I take that as SUBTERFUGE to throw you off the trail.
If he is your friend and you know him well enough simply call or email
him and ask for more clues or just tell him you give up. The only code
breakers I know of who might look at this for you besides the NSA is
SmithDanl@aol.com or check out his web site:
http://codebrkr.infopages.net

SMITH & DANIEL
678-B Shetter Ave
Jacksonville Beach, FL 32250
Phone: 1-800-330-1325

They may help you for free if you make it sound intriguing or at least
interesting...

Hum ... I've got a good way though this ... but some of it just
does'nt seem to make sense ...  any Idea what

UTLITTERISHUMANIORIBUSSTUDEAM

could be ? it's a correctly decyphered cause it works for the rest of
the small text block on the right hand side ...

UT LITTER IS HUMAN I OR I BUSSTUDE AM?
next few lines make sense, Kind of.
Still no idea what the 3 words at the bottom are.

Also are you sure about the birthdate?

Um quick question ... does this guy know that you've posted this on the net? 
I'm hoping this data is not *real* personal data, it's got his name,
address and telephone number listed ... admittadly in code, but you've
given out a house address in plain text.

He's aware of this and still believes no one will get it. We came to
the conclusion that since he 18 and thus on the voting register so his
personal details are in the public domain anyway(being in the UK). i
am very sure about the birthday i was led to beleive the numbers are
to do with primes not quite sure what. The large letters i worked out
to be "the queens collage oxford" I've no idea what the
UTLITTERISHUMANIORIBUSSTUDEAM is doesn't seem to be latin. What does
the rest of the smaller letters say and how are you doing this?

Thanks for all your help guys, even people on IRC code rooms have
struggled with this.

Well if it is UT LITTERIS HUMANIORIBUS STUDEAM then a loose
translation is as follows: "As Letters Humane Zeal". Could that mean
the "zeal to obtain Doctor of Humane Letters"?

Regarding your comment about "prime numbers". If you convert each of
the small letters to a alphabetic value (i.e. A=1...Z=26) you would
have an enormously large real number. You then need to find all of its
prime factors (numbers that can evenly divide into the enormous whole
number with a modified Sieve of Eratosthenes). You would need a
Fortran compiler to deal with numbers this large as others will
truncate large numbers to scientific notation (e+¹²).

Of course you can not factor a prime number as it is only divisable by
itself and 1. So you have to put a dummy number on the end of it to
trick it into becoming a non-prime. That would be the number 5 which
appears at the end of your friends cypher. However, 5 is a prime
number but 15~(X+5) is not. Now when you factor out all of the
non-prime factors with a modified Sieve of Eratosthenes you will have
a bunch of numbers you can split up into two-digit pairs which you can
convert back to decoded alphabetic characters. Sounds like a
fiendishly complex bit of math programming which only a machine like a
DEC mainframe or higher could number crunch. Way too intense for me
and I can't understand why he would go to that much trouble and not
try to market it or something...

I still believe the most unbreakable encryption to date is the ancient
Greek Steganography or as I like to call it "hide in plain sight
encryption". Remember in Star Trek how Giordi LaForge hid the
encrypted SOS datastream from the enemy in the ship's nacelles wake
noise by causing the stream to look like the noise with a
psuedo-random alorithim?

Oh it certainly won't be that complicated. Though this guy is a sound
mathematican when it comes to computers he doesn't know his arse from
his elbow. It's probably gonna be something dead simple that we are
overlooking but i can't place it. Got the latin to be translated as
"so that I may study [a very pretentious way of saying classics]" this
proceeds The Queens collage oxford so it seems to fit in.

Thanks for all the help so far guys/girls. This is all rather beyond me i feel.

Working off kiffer's work, here's the small-text cypher.  Not sure how
kiffer came up with it, except that it's another simple substitution
cypher, and so is in fact suceptible to frequency analysis.  Plain
text in upper case:

UT LITTERIS HUMANIORIBUS STUDEAM
hk qfkkmbfr yhcsafxbfvhr rkhemsc

COUNT FOR EXAMPLE A NUMBER LACKING DIRECTION
ixhak txb mzscgqm s ahcvmb qsiufap efbmikfxa

FOLLOWING THE SO ND OF A DRINK BEFORE THE
txqqxdfap kym rxoae xt s ebfau vmtxbm kym 

FRENCH ARTICLE
tbmaiy sbkfiqm 5

Not sure what to do with the 5.  Also, note what appears to be
"SOUND", but with the cyphertext character 'o' where 'h' should be. 
The possible letters for 'o' are J,Q,V,Y,Z.  Perhaps your friend made
a mystake?

The plain text seems to be some sort of riddle.  "French article"
could be 'un', 'la', etc, or e.g. a magazine article.  "Number lacking
direction" could be a palindromic number.  "Following the sound of a
drink" could mean "that sounds like the name of a drink", or "after
'gulp'" or some such.

This also reveals the hand-written line on the left:

       MODULO
Title: cxehqx 2,2.3

That dot may be a multiplication sign rather than a period.  Still a
bit of a mystery, but could be a clue as to how to interpret the
numbers above.

The key:

NRMWDIPUC T E  GLSAFKB OHX
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
sviemtpyf uqcaxg brkh dz

The small letter code is the reverse of the large-letter code. My
version is an extension of the stuff before:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
sviemtpyf-uqcaxgnbrkhodzlw

the birthday can be found as follows: 2*29*2767 = 160486 (16-04-'86)
i guess the same code holds for the other two numbers, but i have no
way to verify that.

my total transliteration of the text on the left is:

'THE QUEEN[']S COLLEGE OXFORD UNIVERSITY'

'ut litteris humanioribus studeam' (that i study the litterae
humaniores, [finalis])

'count for example a number lacking direction following the sovnd of a
drink before the french article 5'

maybe with 'a number lacking direction' he means 'scalar', which contains 'la'.
i don't know what 'the sovnd of a drink' would be (v can replace u in latin).

that leaves the numbers. i guess the question is whether 'count for
example a number lacking direction following the sovnd of a drink
before the french article 5' provides a clue as to how to read these.

maybe also the modulo 2,2.3 offers a hint, but conventions on how to
write down modulo operations vary quite a bit.

there were some remarks about prime numbers before,
and the birthday encoding, and phone numbers seem to be prime
factorizations indeed (every number is prime, and as i mentioned the
birthday factors multiply to the correct answer). so the guy know how
to get a prime factorization.

A possible interpretation of the riddle, s-ca-la-r, s = sound of
drink, la = french article; ca = 31.
31 mod 26 = 5. this suggests that some kind of mod 26 arithmetic needs
to be applied to the numbers below.

so the riddle would say: "count e.g. 'ca' (31) as 5"

any idea whether (1) the title is relevant, and how to understand
"modulo 2,2.3"? and (2) in which language he might say what about
himself? will the answer be sufficiently obvious that i might actually
recognize it as such?

questions, questions...

I must say i have no idea about what modulo 2,2.3 is maybe help to
crack the numbers with the use of modulus not that it will make much
difference but with all this talk of scalars could be. He will have
only written this in latin or english. Not that that really narrows it
down. I have no idea what this french article 5 is either. Hmmmmmmm i
think i'm left with more questions than answers. he did say once that
the three words about him would be the hardest to crack so probably
explains the difficulty. he's always been a fan of cryptic crosswords
so i'll have a think about his clue. Thanks alot guys and/or Girls.

The Modulo 2,2.3 is modulo 26 a la alphabet. The a through g letters
are subsitutions for 1 through 9, likely directly, less likely
inverted or even less likely offset, anything else would be rather
difficult to crack and you 'it's going to be something dead simple'..

There are 3 words and 3 (c) perhaps to denote each word? There are 4,
28, 12 lower case letters in the code. I will hazard a guess that the
answer words are 2, 14, 6 letters long. How the pairs of letters are
translated to get the number for mod (X,26)? Possible ways...each pair
of letters make X, product, offset by the mysterious 5?

Alan

One other observation...the first 12 letters of the second group are
identical to the 12 letters of the third group. Perhaps if this is
Latin, the arrangement will suggest something.

Alan

cc	bb	cc	ff	di	ae	ei	ie	cc	aa
33	22	33	66	48	15	58	85	33	11
bb	Ib	ii	gg	di	gg	cc	ff	di	ae
22	82	88	77	48	77	33	66	48	15
ei	ie
58	85

The are all the pairs and their numerical equivalents. I've tried
using 26 + - * using mod as suggested and come away with nothing. If
anyone else has anymore ideas i'd be very greatful. Thanks

i didn't have time to work it out, but there is another way to decode
a number like ccbb mod 26: say it's really 3322, one can do subsequent
mod 26 operations on this number: 3322 = 127 * 26 + 20, 127 = 4 * 26 +
23, and 4 mod 26 = 0*26+4, leaving 3322 > 20, 23, 4.

the same can be done for the other numbers.

if you ever find out, let us know.

I still got nothing everything always seems to lead to nothing. I've
no idea how any of this links back to a codified finish. If anyone has
ANYTHING to add please do.

any result?