# Knowledge is key. Skill is not

First let me tell you this. The first is easy, then it MIGHT get harder - depending on knowledge. This is all knowledge and no skill - take that as key.

I like to call this one the "Stage Cipher" Give it a chance, you might develop an idea... and of course, this is gonna be fun haha.

Note down everything you do, everything you find. I doubt you're going to even need a clue for the first part. The rest comes automatically. Good luck!

00110101 00110111 00110110 01001000 00110100 01001100 00110110 01001011 00110110 00110010 00110100 00110111 00110100 00110110 00110011 00110000 00110110 00110011 00110011 00110011 00110101 01001000 00110011 00110000 00110100 00111001 00110100 00111000 00110110 00111000 00110110 01010010 00110100 00111001 00110100 00110111 00110101 00110110 00110110 01000110 00110110 00110010 00110100 00111000 00110101 00110010 00110110 01011001 00110100 01001110 00110110 00111001 00110100 00110010 00110101 00110001 00110101 00111001 00110011 00110011 00110100 01000110 00110110 00110111 00110110 00110010 00110100 00111000 00110110 00111000 00110111 00110000 00110110 00110100 00110111 00111001 00110100 00110010 00110111 00110000 00110110 00110100 00110011 00110011 00110100 00110010 00110111 00110000 00110100 00111001 00110100 00110111 00110101 00110110 00110110 01010100 00110110 00110010 00110100 00111000 00110101 00110010 00110110 01010011 00110100 00111001 00110100 00111000 00110100 01010100 00110110 01010011 00110101 00111001 00110110 01001011 00110101 00110010 00110110 01010101 00110100 00111001 00110100 00111000 00110100 00110010 00110110 01010101 00110100 00111001 00110100 00111000 00110110 00111000 00110111 01001000 00110110 00110100 00110100 00111000 00110100 00110001 00110111 00110101

Personal Statement:

Just to let you all know - those of who take part I am not demeaning any.

I feel like you guys deserve a clue after an hour of deciphering. Here you go:

Hint 1:

Hint 2:

• Rotors: I-II-III
• Rotor Start: MCK
• Rings: AAA

REMEMBER - Enigma doesn't have numbers. Eliminate.

P.S - I don't have the answers on me right now so that's all I can give. They're at my workplace. I was bored, I'll give you some more better hints tomorrow but for now keep working :D

Hint 3:

You've grasped Enigma. Though you still have numbers. Hm, I wonder.

Do you guys give up and want me to reveal the answer to the Stage Cipher?

• Is the fact that this displays as a grid critical? On my iphone it's a 4x36 grid. – LeppyR64 Jul 9 '15 at 13:22
• Not at all my friend. – iZodiac Jul 9 '15 at 13:22

Ok, I got it.

As others have already stated, the first pass is

decoding the binary numbers into ASCII letters, which gives the following string: 576H4L6K6 247463063 335H30494 8686R4947 566F62485 26Y4N6942 5159334F6 762486870 647942706 433427049 47566T624 8526S4948 4T6S596K5 26U494842 6U4948687 H64484175

After that, following the hints and the other answers, we use

the Enigma machine, with the settings given in the hints. Enigma only works on letters, so we obtain: 576D4E6B6 247463063 335A30494 8686F4947 566B62485 26E4C6942 5159334D6 762486870 647942706 433427049 47566B624 8526E4948 4A6B596E5 26F494842 6A4948687 A64484175

And now look at that, those are clearly

Hexadecimal numbers. If we turn them into ASCII again (passing through binary first might be easier), we get: WmNkbGF0c3Z0IHhoIGVkbHRnLiBQY3MgbHhpdyBpd3BpIGVkbHRnIHJkYnRoIHBjIHhzdHAu

Now, anybody who has ever had a little experience with it could never fail to recognize

a base64 string. Decoding it gives: Zcdlatsvt xh edltg. Pcs lxiw iwpi edltg rdbth pc xstp.

which is obviously almost there. Judging by its aspect, it's easy to decide to try

a Caesar cipher or even a tranposition. And it is a tranposition indeed, a ROT 15.

Which gives us the final answer:

Knowledge is power. And with that power comes an idea.

• Brilllllliaannnnttt!! Nice one bro! Did you like my little feature of integrating HEX with Enigma? Well done man! – iZodiac Jul 10 '15 at 12:06
• That was surprisingly hard to figure out, even if it is quite easy to see in retrospect. I had discarded the numbers and was there trying to juggle this weird ABCDEF string about forever, and then I thought, wait, the OP said I still have numbers. A fun puzzle overall. – Aioros Jul 10 '15 at 12:10
• Yeah ahaha nice! - Even though I said that hint, you can still arrange the numbers the wrong way but you arranged them correctly. It was harder than I expected when forming that part of the puzzle because some online encoders/decoders wouldn't read it. So I thought well this would be useful for pure knowledge and you have displayed an outstanding understanding. Genius - used what you were given. Congratulations man. – iZodiac Jul 10 '15 at 12:13
• Good job Aioros ! Just a typo I think, but for the caesar cipher, it's ROT 11, not 15. – TroyAndAbed Jul 10 '15 at 12:28
• Actually, I meant the other way around: Zcdlatsvt goes to Knowledge if you apply ROT 11, yes, but the OP applied a ROT 15 to encrypt. – Aioros Jul 10 '15 at 12:31

Since I am new to the site, I cannot comment on rajb's response but wanted to add this information for his consideration. If someone could please add spoilers to the following info and instruct me as to how to add them myself for the future, it would be appreciated. Spoilers ahead!!

I've gotten to the same place that rajb has and also know little about the machinations of the enigma machine. Doing very quick research I found this:

It includes helpful information about the workings. It mentions the notch on each rotor for implementing the double step mechanism and I believe that is the significance of the small arrows on the second picture in the hint (they provide the rotation direction as well as location of the notches).

I'm still working through more info and will edit this post if/when I achieve it, but wanted to contribute to the search. Hopefully what I added was not immediately obvious info.

• I'll keep this here - it's a useful answer. Work together and share knowledge guys. You're gonna need this new guy! – iZodiac Jul 9 '15 at 16:13
• To also add a spoiler put ">!" Before the text – iZodiac Jul 9 '15 at 16:19
• I looked at a few pages about this and found some implementations of it online, with some flexibility to change the effective "key" (really initial conditions and configuration). But I really don't have an idea what to do with the numbers in this stage since the traditional form of this cipher uses only letters as inputs and outputs. – rajb245 Jul 9 '15 at 17:12
• I see the struggle there. This is not impossible trust me. I'll give you hint 2 - check the edit in about 15 minutes – iZodiac Jul 9 '15 at 17:55
• Using the settings of the second hint (enigma.louisedade.co.uk/enigma.html?m3;b;b123;AAAA;AMCK) , I get : DEBAFBECDBEABEFAA which need to be decoded again. – TroyAndAbed Jul 9 '15 at 18:43

Decoding the grid

With ASCII interpretation of 8 bit binary numbers gives: 576H4L6K6 247463063 335H30494 8686R4947 566F62485 26Y4N6942 5159334F6 762486870 647942706 433427049 47566T624 8526S4948 4T6S596K5 26U494842 6U4948687 H64484175

This is promising because it is all upper case alphanumeric. Now there must be a another stage of decoding this, but the grouping or numerical base is unclear. I'll update if I figure out more.

EDIT 1 From the added hint, it's clear to me that this stage of the cipher is something related to the

German enigima cipher

I don't know much about how that works, but I believe the hint might be related the cipher key for this stage. However, the classic version of that works with only alphabetical characters...this stage has both alphabetic and numeric characters, so I'm thinking more.

• Thanks for the update man! Keep going, on the right track. I've added a hint, check it out! – iZodiac Jul 9 '15 at 14:50
• I'm working through the hint... – rajb245 Jul 9 '15 at 15:18
• Doing great man. On the right lines! – iZodiac Jul 9 '15 at 15:43
• Using the settings of the second hint (enigma.louisedade.co.uk/enigma.html?m3;b;b123;AAAA;AMCK) , I get : DEBAFBECDBEABEFAA which need to be decoded again. – TroyAndAbed Jul 9 '15 at 18:44