bootlesshacker 
Anyone good with ciphers? 400+ characters of cipher text, created with 5 distinct unique images (phases of the moon). No obvious key. Any ideas? #cipher #geocaching
@revk - this strikes me as something you may have an idea about
RevK 
@bootlesshacker Nice one, but no, I can't help, sorry.
Steve "Looking for Work" Pordon (he/him/his)@bootlesshacker Is the letter J missing and are there suspiciously many X's?
@legion303 There's no letters. Just 5 distinct images/emoji's of moon phases. One does appear more than the others but seems like an even distribution otherwise.
@legion303 the 400+ cipher text is made up of the 5 distinct images
@bootlesshacker Got it, I thought those were separate things.
Phil Brass@bootlesshacker what are the names of the five phases? Is the number of ciphertext characters evenly divisible by five?
@pbrass I'm not sure on the names and looks like its not dividable by 5. I've been given a further clue of replacing each distinct image with 1 (any) letter. Definitely looking like Polybius or something but unsure what the key could be
@bootlesshacker @pbrass polybius looks like the right track. If you choose any arbitrary and unique digit 1-5 to replace unique moon phases, then separate them into bigrams, you can construct a key. I constructed the bigrams and did a frequency analysis (English) - there were only 25 unique bigrams in the ciphertext. So in the encryption grid on https://www.dcode.fr/polybius-cipher you can start constructing your key. My two most frequent bigrams were 23 and 12, so I tried E and T in those squares and so on down the frequency list. Because the bigrams themselves are constructed even though the individual digits were arbitrary, this should work, because I'm giving the tool my constructed bigrams as the ciphertext. Unfortunately, I couldn't get anything resembling words after a lot of shuffling letters around in the grid.
@bootlesshacker @pbrass Although I just now realized that trying to reverse it that way was a waste of time. The bigram that occurs the most is probably the letter E and you can directly replace them in the constructed ciphertext. I'm not getting anything meaningful that way either, unfortunately.
Erik Lyden@bootlesshacker does this, or something similar, help?
https://www.dcode.fr/lunar-alphabet-leandro-katz
https://www.dcode.fr/lunar-alphabet-leandro-katz
AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈♾️@bootlesshacker
One text encrypted five times in sequence or split into five and each group encrypted separately? I suspect either trial and error (lots of) or build your own bombe.
One text encrypted five times in sequence or split into five and each group encrypted separately? I suspect either trial and error (lots of) or build your own bombe.
@AlisonW not too sure to be honest - I haven't looked at it in a while but may give it another crack this weekend. I'm terrible with ciphers though so not sure how far I'll get