Clues for deciphering the 'New Year's Day' code are split between three different posts by Ian Q.
A string of 32 letters, "UcrxtfwvRahfzVuyzwXspgblsfedXgys" was posted, along with the message, "First of four."
2 January:
A reference to the "other" Frank Miller. Miller was the cryptographer responsible for creating/ describing the one-time pad (OTP) in 1882.
In a post about Charles Darwin, the following OTP 546-14 is given. I'm fairly certain that when I first read this post at about 15:00 this afternoon (23 Jan.) there was no hyphen in the OTP. I think it's been edited to make it simpler to decode the text from the New Year's Day post.
-- Update 23:50, 23 Jan. 2015 --
If you follow the link provided in the Darwin post from 2 January, you'll be directed to a digitized copy of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (5th Ed.). the OTP points us to page 546 (left), line 14, which reads, "How these difficulties can be mastered."
Since the cipher was only 32 characters long, and this sentence has 33 characters, the key becomes:
The capitalization used is the same as that in the cypher, and it's significance will be made known in a later point.
The next step is to use the key to correctly decode the message, as outlined in Table 1. Each character is substituted for a numeral, with A = 0, and Z = 25. The value of the key is then subtracted from the value of the corresponding cipher. If the resulting number is less than 0, then 26 is added.
Since the cipher was only 32 characters long, and this sentence has 33 characters, the key becomes:
'HowtheseDiffiCultiEscanBemasTere'
The capitalization used is the same as that in the cypher, and it's significance will be made known in a later point.
The next step is to use the key to correctly decode the message, as outlined in Table 1. Each character is substituted for a numeral, with A = 0, and Z = 25. The value of the key is then subtracted from the value of the corresponding cipher. If the resulting number is less than 0, then 26 is added.
Table 1. Solution to the New Year's Day/ Darwin OTP
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The decoded message thus reads:
"NovemberOscarTangoTangoHotelEcho"
The uppercase letters in the cipher were used to denote the beginnings of each word. Initially I had interpreted the upper case I as a lower case L, but that was easy enough to fix once the rest of the cipher had been cracked. Once again there is a code within a code, and using the NATO phonetic alphabet, we can be further decode this to read "NOT THE."
Since this was the first of four OTPs, we'll have to wait and see what the rest of the message is, and whether or not it ties in with the two 'Masonic' codes.
-- Update 12:16, 24 Jan. 2015 --
I was researching the ravens of the Tower of London, when I came across a list of unlucky symbols. In Chinese custom, the numbers four, five, and six are considered unlucky. These are the same numbers used for the page reference in the New Year's Day/ Darwin OTP code. Not sure if there is more meaning to this, or simply a coincidence.
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