Challenge 8

Can you crack the final challenge this year? It is tough! Thankfully you know something about 8A - in an uncharacteristically sloppy moment Harry gave away a lot of info about this one in his last message to Charlie. Challenge 8B is an entirely different kettle of kippers. Charlie thinks it is encrypted using the Solitaire Cipher which is a highly secure pen and paper system based on a deck of cards. In real life it was invented by the famous security expert Bruce Schneier and you can find a description of it on his website. Without clues it would withstand any attack you are likely to mount, but thankfully Charlie managed to recover some info and you will find it on the Challenge 8 page. You can try to crack this using a computer or with pen and paper, but in either case you will probably find it useful to have a deck of cards to hand so you can figure out how it works. You need a deck of 52 ordinary playing cards plus two Jokers that must be distinguishable from one another. I found it helpful to make a couple slightly larger than the cards I was using as you need to find them easily in the middle of the deck. You can download a pdf of the cards I used and shrink it to fit your cards if you like. You will find it at: Harry's Jokers. As Charlie says the full key to the cipher is not available right now and it will take us a while to try to read it. We will probably manage to read a couple of extra cards a day and plan to publish them on the Challenge page between 7.30 and 8am each day. You should have them all by Christmas Eve, so by then anyone can crack the cipher if they have the patience. Of course if you have the skill (and the will to win) you might have cracked it well before then ... Good luck, Harry