Modern cryptography uses lots of advanced math to make text completely hidden to an attacker. Before modern methods were created, however, people did clever things with letters and used a variety of simple, clever tricks to encrypt messages. These techniques don't provide secrecy anymore against a good attacker, but they make for fun word puzzles. That's what we're using them for here.

Below are a bunch of excerpts from famous works of literature, each encrypted in a different way. All the encryption techniques are insecure, and you should be able to break them. Part of the challenge, though, is that you aren't just missing the key — you have to figure out what the encryption method itself is as well.

You are allowed to use almost any resources you want for this. You can search on the internet for useful techniques, or for historically used encryption methods (which might come up). The only thing you can't do is use programs or websites meant to automatically figure things out for you. (You can certainly write useful programs yourself to use, and those could certainly be very useful for some of the ciphertexts. I have tried to make most of them entirely doable by hand, but it might take a bit more time/effort that way.)

You don't need to decrypt the entire thing — just enough to know what work it was drawn from. If you have most of them solved (say, only 3 remaining) let me know and I'm happy to add more. Answers will be discussed at the second meeting.

The Ciphertexts

Challenge 1

Challenge 2

Challenge 3

Challenge 4

Challenge 5

Challenge 6

Challenge 7

Challenge 8

Challenge 9

Challenge 10