Department of Computing & Information Technology

Some Information About Mr. Gopaul

To be brief my name is Josh Gopaul and I am currently pursuing a BSc in Computer Science with Management. I have a love and passion for Computer Science, I may not be the best at it, but I am working hard to be. I really like programming and it honestly feels great when you work hard at something and you see the fruition of your hard work. I do not know exactly what career path I want to follow however it will definitely be along the lines of Computer Science. One thing I can say for everyone who is reading this is that to never give up even if hope seem bleak, keep pushing forward. You will never know what is truly for you if you do not make the effort. If you truly love something go for it and don’t give up. I believe every problem has a solution, but the solution doesn’t come by staring at the four corners of your room, it’s by constantly searching for the answer. Don`t stop at dead ends, take a step back, think and try again.

Solution Strategy

In order to discover the secret message, the binary digits were read from the encrypted file were grouped in 8, therefore 8 bits. 8 bits represents 1 character. Hence, to figure out the character that it represents I had to convert each 8-bit binary to decimal values then refer to the ASCII Character table to see the range of decimals that represent the characters that the secret message would possibly contain. After I used a criterion of 32 to 127 inclusive (decimal values) and assign the characters to another character array. I then tested the output to see the raw message (not the final decryption), hence looked for patterns and I realized that there where repeats of # in between groups of characters. Honestly, I was really confused here I didn’t know what it could mean but then I started to think about Caesar ciphers. I knew a Caesar cipher is an encryption method where letters in the alphabet are switched out by another letter later down in the alphabet. These letters would be shifted by the same amount for each letter, hence hiding the message. However, I didn’t notice that there was a shift by 3 in the ASCII Character table from the space to the #. To figure out how much the shift was, I used trial and error where I started from 1 then 2 and then I came to 3 where I realized the words started to appear. I also had to adjust my criterion to 7 to 127 inclusive (decimal values) to get the spaces as well as the sentences on separate lines afterwards. Finally, the encrypted message was decrypted, and the secret message was not a secret anymore. This was really challenging and took a lot of time and energy, but I was able to figure out the final message.