XOR the ciphertext together to eliminate the key as you suggest. The result will be two plain texts XOR-ed together.
Now it becomes a matter of detecting a pattern within this data. It is possible to do this by examining the encoding. ASCII letters always have a certain bit pattern, e.g. 'A'
is 41
in hexadecimals or 0100 0001
in binary and 'a' is 61
in hexadecimals or 0110 0001
. So if XOR'ed together you will get something like 0010 0000
. Notice the high number of bits set to zero. Also note that two ASCII encoded letters XOR-ed together will start with two zero valued bits.
Finally, text uses a lot of spaces, which are encoded using the value 20
in hexadecimal or 0010 0000
in binary. When XOR-ed with any letter it will return a different case, but the result will still be a letter. When XOR-ed with itself it will become a 0000 0000
binary value (just like any character encoding XOR-ed with itself).
With enough ciphertexts it is possible to get the plain text and the key; with just 2 ciphertext this is probably not attainable. That's probably the next assignment.