> PEE151R4HEL.LCC8.2TFECE.EOT.901OTHN.ANT23P2RRAG.SNO0.O0TULE. More gibberish! At least this time it's not fake Chinese, but upper case letters, numbers and periods. Brief analysis suggests this is encrypted text (writing it in allcaps is a classic) using transposition (it's too short for frequency analysis and the index of coincidence hints at English) which gives us a specific hint how to proceed. The numbers could be a port and IP address to connect to, so they should line up to one if we're doing things right. Most suspiciously, the length of the ciphertext is 60, this allows arranging it in rectangle shapes of 2x30, 3x20, 4x15, 5x12 and 6x10. Trying all of them out, the 5x12 arrangement looks most promising as each line ends in a period: PEE151R4HEL. LCC8.2TFECE. EOT.901OTHN. ANT23P2RRAG. SNO0.O0TULE. If you read it each column down, it spells out the following: > PLEASECONNECTTO18.205.93.120PORT1204FORTHETRUECHALLENGE..... Alright, let's connect with `nc 18.205.93.120 1204`: YPWI5WORASODSZ772USR:CO ^C [...] YPWICYORASODSC07OUSR:LG ^C [...] YPWIHRORASODSSS4JUSR:H7 foo Invalid password The service expects a password, probably related to the preceding line of gibberish. After staring at it for a while, you can't help but notice it includes all letters for the word "password", so it must be another transposition cipher. The colon staying in the same place confirms that it's fully deterministic. Trying out a bunch of these on https://www.dcode.fr/ shows that it's a Railway cipher. For example the last line can be arranged into the following zigzag lines: YPWIHRORASODSSS4JUSR:H7 Y P W I H R O R A S O D S S S 4 J U S R : H 7 YOURPASSWORDIS:SHSH4RJ7 Writing some code to do this for us isn't terribly hard and eventually the prompt can be bypassed. This is not the end though: ##### ### # # # ###### # ### ###### PVEECR PO4LAE A4SNEE SSKWEO RNDMHT IOQRE: At long last there's the Grille the challenge title alludes to. Applying the mask to the text below gives you the first characters of the plaintext: ##### ### # # # ###### # ### ###### P L E A S EE N T PLEASEENT[...] To get the rest, rotate the mask and try again. Like last time the characters for "password" can be spotted in the ciphertext, so presumably it contains another password: ### # # #### ### ## #### # ### ## # # # E R O N E M O RE ERONEMORE[...] ###### ### # ###### # # # ### ##### P A SS W O R D : PASSWORD:[...] # # # ## ### # #### ## # # #### # # ### VE C 4 4 K E H I Q VEC44KEHIQ Write some more code solving the cipher, submit the password and you finally get a flag.