That’s how Laura Benner ’25, an engineering and computer science double major, described cracking the . Joining her on the Kryptos team were her sister Renae Benner and her roommate Mana Acosta ’25, both engineering majors at EMU. On April 14, the team of three took first place in a contest featuring 151 students from colleges and universities across 16 states and Australia. 

Since 2011, Central Washington University (CWU) has hosted this annual online competition for undergraduate students. The contest consists of three challenges that present brief scenarios along with some ciphertext. Contestants work individually or in teams to discover the original English plaintext message.

Students are permitted to use any resources available online to solve the puzzles. But the puzzles require a great deal of effort and critical thinking, far more than ChatGPT, for instance, can do. “It’s really funny,” Laura Benner said. “If you give the entire puzzle to ChatGPT, it will spit back some nonsense solution to you.”

Acosta and the two Benner sisters have all participated in the Kryptos challenge before and won first or second place. 

• 2025: First Place Team: Mana Acosta, Laura Benner, Renae Benner
• 2024: Second Place Team: Iris Anderson, Laura Benner, Renae Benner
• 2023: First Place Team: Mana Acosta, Laura Benner, Caleb Hostetler
• 2022: First Place Team: Mana Acosta, Caleb Hostetler, Hannah Leaman

Typically, an EMU team gets together on Thursday night when the competition opens and works until they solve all three challenges. This year, though, the team was able to solve only one challenge on Thursday night. Since CWU does not provide updates on students’ progress, they assumed they had lost. But on Monday morning, the last day of the competition, the team received an email saying nobody had solved the three challenges yet. They were shocked and immediately got back together to work on the puzzles again.

“The fresh start was good,” Acosta said. “We should have gotten together on Friday, but we were so sure that other teams had already won.” The three worked quickly and managed to find leads that let them solve the last two puzzles. About 20 minutes after they submitted their Google form describing how they had solved the last puzzle, CWU sent a confirmation email that the EMU team had won first place.

EMU teams have historically performed well in this competition, and by now, they feel some pressure to win. While the 2025 team doesn’t know how other teams work, contestants at EMU usually dedicate a large block of time to working together. The room is typically silent, with individuals working on their own until someone finds a lead or breakthrough. Then they all talk it over and work together. The most challenging part of the competition is not losing motivation.

The first year Laura Benner joined the team, she didn’t know much about breaking ciphers and let other members take the lead. But this year she took more agency in solving the puzzles, and for at least two of them, she had “that electric moment” of discovering the plaintext.

While her classes haven’t directly applied to learning ciphers, she said, “Both engineering and cryptanalysis are highly logical. You need to be able to identify patterns and know when the route you’re going down isn’t working.” 

The EMU teams took first and third place at this year’s Kryptos competition sponsored by Central Washington University. The first-place team was made up of freshman Aron Harder and seniors Stephen Quenzer and Josiah Driver. The third-place team included senior Mark Harder (Aron’s older brother) and Eastern Mennonite High School freshman Cameron Byer, the son of EMU professor .

Kryptos is a code-breaking competition of secret writing, known as cryptanalysis. The 2014 competition included three encoded messages that teams worked on over a long weekend. Once an encoded message was cracked and the plaintext English was revealed, contestants quickly wrote a one-page description on their methods before moving to the next code. The teams were judged not only on breaking the codes, but on how quickly they did the work.

While all three of the men on the winning team are computer science majors, none of them had any cryptanalysis experience prior to the competition. In fact, both EMU teams only entered the competition the day before it was scheduled to start and for the most part prepared by briefly Googling cryptanalysis strategies and the previous years’ problems, said Driver.

Quenzer, Driver and Aron Harder are all in Owen Byer’s statistics class. Their final statistics project involved collecting data and developing a presentation based on their findings. Unfortunately, as is the case sometimes with statistics, their data ended up being inadequate for clear findings, Quenzer said. They went to professor Byer for help and he offered them this alternative: If they would participate in the Kryptos competition, he would accept this in lieu of their final statistics presentation.

Mark Harder, who is a math and major, happened to be writing a paper on the history of cryptanalysis for one of his classes when he heard about the competition. He had developed a friendship with Cameron (the high school student), and the two decided to enter the competition just for fun.

“It doesn’t help to have a lot of previous knowledge,” Harder said, because “each problem is quite a bit different.” What is important is “being able to be flexible and think outside the box.”

Quenzer viewed his team’s crash-preparation for the contest and resulting win as no big deal, noting that typically “all three of us put a lot more effort into our studies than is necessary – we go above and beyond.”

The EMU first-place team was the only team to solve all three problems. The EMU third-place team solved two problems, but was just beaten time-wise by the second-place team.

Similar to EMU, Central Washington University had two teams in the top three winning categories. Other teams that placed represented:  Pacific University, Sarah Lawrence College, Western Washington University, Eastern Oregon University, University of Arizona, and University of Central Missouri.