| Welcome to the E3 'Lincolnshire Poacher'
challenge page. Below is a link to a complete transcription of an E3 'Lincolnshire
Poacher' transmission, recorded at 2100GMT, on September 26th, frequency
13.357usb. It features 200 five figure groups. Nothing is known about the
content of Lincolnshire Poacher (LP) transmissions, save that each transmission
sends exactly 200 groups. Signal strength is very strong in Europe.
Your task is to use whatever crypanalytic attack you can to decrypt this message. This cryptographic challenge is more daunting than the RSA challenge, because nothing is known about the algorithm used to encipher LP transmissions. We do not even know for sure who the transmitting party is. If it is possible to decrypt some if not all of this message, using a massively networked brute force attack, we may be able to discern something about what the LP really is, and who is responsible for its daily transmissions. Use whatever crypanalytic attack you can to decrypt this message. If you require more plaintext examples, please email irdial@irdial.com and we will provide you with further cyphertext. N.B. All email concerning this challenge must be PGP encrypted. Alternatively, you can record your own examples live off the air, from any one of the following frequencies: 16475, 16084, 15682, 14487, 13375, 12603, 11545, 10426, 9251, 8464, 7755, 7337, 6959, 6900, 6485, 5746 and 5422. Note however, that some of the LP transmissions are believed to carry dummy traffic, since they transmit the same set of 200 groups again and again. It may be useful to take one of these 'dummy' examples and cross check it with a 'real' sample to see if the two correlate in any way. LP transmissions on 13.375usb are never jammed, while transmissions on 15.682usb are consistently jammed. This may or may not say something about the value of the traffic. The transmission below, and all 13.375 LP traffic is different for each transmission. All claims to the prize must be accompanied by a full written description of how the crack was executed, along with any software that was used to achieve the crack. It must be demonstrated that the crack is a genuine mathematical soultion, since we do not have the original plaintext in our posession. The Prize for the first person to email us a deciphered text along with the method employed in the crack will be an ancient Gold Roman coin. The Judges decision is final. |