2002
The story so far . . .
In 1838 Queen Victoria has just been crowned and three of the greatest British scientific minds of the 19th century dream up the idea of a sophisticated and revolutionary mechanical cipher machine - an idea about a hundred years ahead of its time - that threatens to upset the international political balance. Their machine inevitably attracts the attention of a foreign power that is out to steal the idea for its own ends. Follow this adventure by cracking their coded correspondence on our Cipher Challenge trail! Be the first to crack each message and you and your school will each win a prize from the £10,000 total prize fund.
2003
Challenges 6 and 8 only exist as .gif files. The others had links to a text file but for some reason 6 & 8 come only in this format - tough!
2004
The name is Harry. Harry Schulz Vandiver. Like you I'm a mathematician, and like you I have a job to do . We have to solve the mystery of Die Alchemisten. Lives may depend on it.
In March 1937, in the wreckage of the Hindenburg the FBI discovered a small packet of documents. They carried a swastika and the legend "Die Alchemisten " — the alchemists — so you might think someone would have taken notice, but somehow they didn't. Then early in 1939 my friend Phil over in the Bureau was taking a look at a hooky insurance scam, mail fraud, you know the sort of thing, when he found the papers. Alarm bells rang across Washington when they noticed they were encrypted. With war drums beating in Europe Phil's department was asked to look into it. When they couldn't crack it they called me in. It looked to them like maybe the fire might not have been an accident after all ...
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
Tempest, temp’pest, n. lit. a portion of time, a season, then weather, bad weather; wind rushing with great velocity, usually with rain or snow; a violent storm ; any violent commotion. [L. tempestas, a season. tempest—tempus, time]
Tempest was the name of a classified (secret) U.S. government project to study the susceptibility of some computer and telecommunications devices to emit electromagnetic radiation (EMR) in a manner that can be used to reconstruct intelligible data. Tempest's name is believed to have been a code name used during development by the U. S. government in the late 1960s, but at a somewhat later stage, it became an acronym for Telecommunications Electronics Material Protected from Emanating Spurious Transmissions. http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/Tempest
In 2011, a group of young students discovered a new meaning of Tempest that had remained hidden for 200 years. This is their story ...
2011
2012
