> Welcome to crypto. We start with the classics! Deliver the decrypted > form of the message to the guard on your journey. > > nc crypto.chal.csaw.io 5004 Another challenge where you're completely reliant on hints to get going: - Length of keys is 25, which (cleaned-up) ramblings would fit that? - If near-perfect ramblings are used to encrypt in order, how should it be decrypted? - The guard want's a legible message they can read in! Searching for the challenge name it turns out the Bifid cipher is a thing. It's a variation of the polybius one, which has the specialty of arranging keys into a 5x5 square and using an alphabet where i and j are represented by the same letter. Going by the first hint I cleaned up the `ramblings` file by deleting all characters except that 25-letter alphabet and obtained 20 keys. The second hint suggests the plaintext has been encrypted several times using different keys, decryption would use the keys in reverse order. Knowing that I visited and copy-pasted a bunch of times, resulting in the following decryption: xustxsomexunnecessaryxtextxthatxholdsxabsolutelyxnoxmeaningxwhatsoeverxandxbearsxnoxsignificancextoxyouxinxanyxway The third hint suggests turning that into a legible message for the service: $ nc crypto.chal.csaw.io 5004 <<< 'just some unnecessary text that holds absolutely no meaning whatsoever and bears no significance to you in any way' > Alright messenger, what did the boss tell you to tell me? Better be right or you're not getting in! flag{t0ld_y4_1t_w4s_3z}