Cryptology

[Bemis]

If the U in it means another vowel, it will be e. E is the most commonly used letter in the english language, and there are a lot of those Us. Also, e is often used in douldes like the Us in the encryption are.

Before we go about this, could you tell us how much, if any, experience your friend has with cryptology?
[deleted, formerly addressed the difference between public and private encryption keys (not relevant)] Because the string is short, most likely a few possibilities will work.

In short, what I'm saying is that, while I'll give it a crack (and I'll give it to some friends that are much more computer-fluent to let them have a crack at it), if your friend has a good idea of what their doing, this might take a while [obscure reference to a coding sequence no longer relevant] More info concerning the code might shorten the process.

An option to decrypt this is to use a dictionary-style attack at the cyphertext. This is to say that you find a list of all 8-letter words and then see which ones match the rules for "buuconac". those rules would be:
-the second and third letters are the same (only in this case becuase it's a letter-letter substitution code)
-the fourth and last letters are the same (again, only in this case)
-no other letters are the same
-cyphertext "a" occurs once in the string, so it is likely to not be a common letter (listed in order of most frequent to least frequent, in the english language, the letter order is "E T A O N I S R H D L U F C M W P G Y B V K X J Q Z", source: Enchanted Mind, Cryptography )

Attached is my results (so far) after searching (visually and briefly, so there might be minor errors) through the 2000 most common words in the english language for some of the longer cyphertext strings. Hope this helps! (I'll post my results later after I make some real progress)

[Ein]

This is turning out better than I expected. So far as I know, it started as a joke and this friend of mine said, "gee, I think I'll make one of those too!" In otherwords, I expect no tricks of any sort. Most likely, he just substitued (consistantly) one letter for another. A dictionary attack is what I have in mind but I didn't have any software to do so. I also believe he only used standard english, meaning no strange spellings etc.

Thanks to all who are trying! Especially mgreenley.

I was looking at the information in the thread to date when it hit me that there are a few more clues to decoding this that I'd like to point out to everyone else to save the rest of you some time.
-any repeated characters can allow you to quickly decode the message after you have one letter figured out, but consecutive repeats are more valuble in the initial process
-bqn,zqw,oqw, owb and nwg are all different 3-letter words. Once I finish up some more work, I'll check them out, but remember that when you're essentially brute-force decrypting anything, playing hunches is fine. If you have a guess for one letter, re-write the line below the original and work from there for no less than 10 mins, but no more than 1 hour unless you have a reason to. That bwn ends in an "n" (see a later point for "n")
-These all being different is signifigant because you can compare the cypher-text to clear-text to get a list of possibilities.
-"zirl" has at least one vowel in it. An assuption, but a pretty safe one at that.
-"sr" also should have a vowel in it. Again, a pretty safe assumption.
-"wn and sr" has a limited number or sensible combinations, "is, an, no, be, if, of" is a good list to start from when guessing. If this is a complete sentance, sr has an even more limited number of posibilities. Odds are w is indeed a vowel, but unless you're certain, always qualify your statements.
Important -I messed up in my original .doc (hehe sorry), the information in it is correct, but the original string has one error and two omissions (that's what happens when you're working on two AP projects and a health project while you're typing.
-if we assume u, w and q to be vowels as stated by others in this thread, "kgcuuwf" has a three-vowel string, which narrows the search
-the cypher-text "n" is most likely a consonant

And those projects are calling me again, so I've got to get back to work. Good luck with this in the meantime!

P.S. google has a few word-lists if you dredge through the muck (Some useful URL's are below), but I couldn't find a program either, you just have to sit down and dedicate and hour or so to just check one sequence for possibilities and once you get two or three sequences, you can compare to narrow them down from those lists. (i.e. I put all those words in my .doc list in the possible first, then on the second pass when it was just them, eliminated a few.)

URLs:
http://dictionary.new-frontier.info/w/By_word_length_(longest)
http://www1.harenet.ne.jp/~waring/vo...sts/1-2000.txt
http://www.enchantedmind.com/html/cr...ptography.html
http://www.multicentric.com/wapi/mct...NTRIX&ObjID=84 (program, didn't feel like figuring out)
http://www.sedl.org/reading/topics/exception.html (use the syllable list)