Sarah and Igor are exchange students. Sarah lives in Moscow while Igor is in Berlin. To keep their little secrets confidential, they encrypt their emails. Decrypt the message to find out what Sarah wrote this time.
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Personally I don't see the point in the Cyrillic part of this, it does nothing to add to the security of the encryption. This is essentially just another simple substitution cipher…nothing new.

This is essentially just another simple substitution cipher…nothing new.

Yes, you are right. This was the insight to gain – using other letters doesn't improve the security. However, I think it fits to the used story :-)

Yes but there are already enough challenges on the site that use exactly the same encryption…nothing new is being tested here.

It is my opinion that this site was created to offer new and innovative challenges. After all anyone can go to another site and solve simple substitution ciphers!

I could understand the need for one or two of these (for absolute beginners that have no experience) but why is there any need for more of the same?

Yes, but there are already enough challenges on the site that use exactly the same encryption…nothing new is being tested here.
It is my opinion that this site was created to offer new and innovative challenges. After all anyone can go to another site and solve simple substitution ciphers!
I could understand the need for one or two of these (for absolute beginners that have no experience) but why is there any need for more of the same?

Hello fretty.

We are aware of this dilemma and of the fact that there are much more level-1-challenges than according ones for the other levels which are only variants of the same core cryptographic problem. There are two main reasons for this: First, we want to offer new users enough training material to improve themselves. Secondly, most of these challenges have been handed in by users, who have already invested a remarkable amount of time and effort, and created a well-thought challenge with a nice and appealing story. I think it would be unfair to reject only because it is too easy for advanced users and because the core crypto problem is already covered in another challenge. We try to make sure that each new challenge even in level 1 has at least some new flavor or variant before reaching the actual crypto problem.

We are always looking for new and innovative challenges for each of the four levels and you are more than welcome to hand in your own challenges or to suggest topics/encryption methods so that our team can come up with challenges for this area of cryptography.

i'm confused, does the keyword 'dnjepr' have to do with the problem cyphertext or does it just pertain to the example?

I'm confused, does the keyword 'dnjepr' have to do with the problem ciphertext or does it just pertain to the example?

This is part of the example describing how the cipher works. The given ciphertext of the challenge uses another keyword.

The plaintext is in english or german ?

The plaintext is in english or german ?

German!

The plaintext is in english or german ?

German!

I was trying to solve it with English frequency table then I saw this message. [HTML_REMOVED] . It is great because this is another challenge I don't need to solve.

is this possible to solve for those who can't speak or understand German??

yes, only english is required