Challenge: Some villains managed to obtain a letter written to Santa. It was addressed to North Pole 34162578 and contained the message:
llHdeoeaanraSt,Iitwyreouthwniiteionttnownyaurothchaitrstsimpasutdaignnerxmbsya{_e_TihLt1_dlueRmM_beyr0}!
This is a really straight forward cypher, the address 34162578 is used to shuffle letters in 8 letter blocks. I couldn’t find an online tool for this fast enough, so I wrote a PHP scrip.
$o = "";
foreach (str_split($in, 8) as $chunk) {
$ch = " ";
foreach (str_split($key) as $k=>$i) {
$ch[intval($i)-1] = $chunk[$k];
}
$o .= $ch;
}
var_dump($o);
It was later, when I came back that I found an online tool: https://www.dcode.fr/transposition-cipher key = 34162578 mode = Write by rows, read by rows
Flag: xmas{_The_Lit1le_dRumMer_b0y}
What did I learn: Easier to find tools.