Reply To: Extracurricular Challenges

@RickOShea, indeed 8 bit ascii would be redundant, this is based on factors of the text length. We all know that five bits are the least you need to encode 26 symbols, but 5 is not a factor of the text length. It could be that the encoded ciphertext is padded prior to transposition?

Maybe the higher number of zeros provides some evidence for redundant encoding, ie. high zero bits. I made my own 912 character ciphertext with 8 bit ascii, and I get 54% zero, 45% one, similar to the distribution of the cipher.

Assuming that this long repeated sequence relates to a repeat in the plaintext, perhaps we are looking for a transposition that preserves repeats at those offsets (maybe one that operates in fixed size blocks)?