Security Month on DevCentral: Challenge #1

As we highlight security on DevCentral this month, we wanted to pose a fun security challenge to exercise those brain cells a little bit.  Today's challenge focuses on cryptography.  The object of this challenge is to figure out a plaintext message given some ciphertext and clues.

The plaintext message for today's challenge was encrypted using a one-time-pad encryption method to generate the ciphertext.  

The pad is a series of letters that are formed from a unique message based on a DES Challenge from several years ago.  These DES Challenges were a series of brute force attack contests created by RSA Security to highlight the lack of security provided by the Data Encryption Standard (DES).  The object of these challenges was to find the encryption key and use it to decrypt the ciphertext into a plaintext message.  The first challenge began in 1997 and was solved in 96 days by the DESCHALL Project.  The next challenge, "DES Challenge II-1" was solved by distributed.net in early 1998.  Then, "DES Challenge II-2" was solved in July 1998.  Finally, "DES Challenge III" was released and solved in January 1999.

The pad for today's challenge is the plaintext message from the DES Challenge II-1.  The plaintext message from the DES Challenge included a colon in the middle of the message and a period at the end, but the pad for today's challenge removes the colon and the period (i.e. removes all non-letter characters).  Further, to get today's pad, you'll need to move all the letters to lowercase and also remove all spaces.  

For example, if the plaintext message from that challenge was, "Plaintext: Hello World." then the pad for today's challenge would be:  plaintexthelloworld

 

The ciphertext for today's challenge is:  wlzuipkvtxvguky

 

The challenge?  Find the plaintext message.  

Get it?  Got it?  Go!

Use the comments below to post the plaintext message, and feel free to tell us the method you used to solve the challenge!