Classical Cipher Ideas



Hello, I'm working on a puzzle. I've been researching for a while but I'm just not coming up with anything. I don't really want to post the ciphertext out of respect for the puzzle maker. It would be a shame to ruin his hardwork developing the puzzle to post the CT here along with a discussion about how to solve it since google does such a good job these days.

The cipertext is actually a set of 112 numbers, no obvious groupings, they are listed in 8 lines. I know 2 ciphers were used, and I think one of them may be a null cipher since part of the puzzle talks about nullifying and then it will be made clear. I'm stuck on finding the other cipher though. The puzzle mentions the key being located in a paragraph that makes a few references to the mathematical constant phi. There is another hint that says it is all greek to me. So I think that points to something like a scytale or some other transposition cipher or a caesar shift but I'm just not sure. The plaintext will be some numbers, but they may be spelled out so I'm not sure if I'm looking for digits or text.

Are there any known hand ciphers that have a numerical cipher text and use a numerical key? Any other ciphers that may have originated in ancient Greece may be helpful as well. Or if anything comes to mind about how the CT may be used with phi.. I've been looking at fractioning ciphers like nihilist and others that use a checkerboard but nothing seems to be working out with any method I've tried yet.

I guess I'm just stuck and looking for something to get me rolling in the right direction. If the CT is really necessary I can post it somehow.. or maybe email it to anyone interested, but if the information provided is enough I'd like to refrain from doing that.

I appreciate any thought anyone can give to this, your help is much appreciated. Also, I would like to point out that I did try to find a more recreational crypto forum/newsgroup but couldn't find anything that looked like it was active or full of a bunch of cryptjunkies. I apologize in advance if this seems like such a n00b post, just didn't know where else to go.

Thanks
-J
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