200-Year-Old Cipher Finally Cracked 141
Posted
by
timothy
from the castle-aaaaaaaagh dept.
from the castle-aaaaaaaagh dept.
Attila Dimedici writes "A code expert just cracked a code used by a friend of Thomas Jefferson in a letter written to Jefferson some 200 years ago. This code is fairly easy to crack using a computer, but extremely difficult without one. I think it would have been much harder if the author had not included an indication as to what code algorithm he used in the letter accompanying the coded message."
Re:just cracked?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Security by obscurity (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, unless you knew the key, it would have been extremely time consuming to discover the solution, even if you knew the algorithm used. Notice it took the guy a week to solve it, even with a computer, and modern cryptanalysis techniques.
This is a textbook example of Schneier's Law (Score:3, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneier's_Law [wikipedia.org]
Re:Biggest letdown ever (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Contents of message (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wake me when the Voynich is cracked (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps, but there's no evidence that the Voynich manuscript is a cypher in the traditional sense. A natural language isn't normally "decyphered", since it was never encrypted in the first place.
Given that there are many hundreds of thousands of natural languages today for which there is no written form, it's entirely possible that this is a script invented for such a language. In WW2, natural native American languages were sometimes used in this way as an "unbreakable cypher" - who's to say that medieval Europeans hadn't done the same thing themselves?
If that is the case, then it isn't particularly compelling (we know of many extinct languages for which no known writing exists - and hundreds more go extinct yearly), and is not so much "difficult" as useless - the text could never be read.
The wikipedia article doesn't say anything about using techniques to detect writing that is no longer visible, so I must assume no such techniques have been used.
(It may be possible to establish some of the content of a missing page if the page after had been underneath at the time of writing. Non-destructive techniques for doing this formed a part of the case against the West Midland's serious crime squad in the 90s, where it could be shown pages of confessions had been altered after being signed. However, if no such analysis has taken place, the presence of such data is unknown.)
Regardless, there are many missing pages. From the articles, the page numbers seem to be relatively new compared to the text, so we don't know how many pages are actually missing, we only know how many went missing since being numbered. This makes understanding the text very difficult and even if the text could be translated, there's no guarantee we could even read it or understand it without those pages.
We know vastly more about Linear A than we do about the script on the Voynich manuscript, including the archaeology of the people writing Linear A, yet after all this time we've got no further than knowing the number system and a few of the numbers in it.
Re:Wake me when the Voynich is cracked (Score:3, Insightful)
It is more likely that the Voynich was written in a dead language written by a person hoping to preserve that language in some way.
Re:Wake me when the Voynich is cracked (Score:4, Insightful)
That is what makes it so compelling, the fact that it happened, not in a vaccum like the Aboriginal Amazon, not in ancient history like Linear A, not in Stone, or papyrus, or etched on tree bark, but that it happened inside of western society, using "modern methods" (for the day), and it is a language/code that can be verified as not being junk, but that nobody had seen before or since.
Re:Security by obscurity (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know, port knocking starts to sound like a password to me.
Re:Security by obscurity (Score:3, Insightful)
Port knocking is a form of password in essence. I can know everything about the method of security, but without the actual sequence it does me no good.
Changing ports on the other hand, requires at the absolute most for me to brute force all ~32k ports, there are port mapping tools that will do it much more simply. Thus obscurity, since once I know what the method is, I can break it easily.
Re:Wake me when the Voynich is cracked (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:lotto... (Score:3, Insightful)
Given that these numbers have just come to light, in the incredible coincidence that they also happen to be this week's winning lottery numbers you'll win less money because you'll have to share your winnings with all the other wrong-headed people who think this increases their likelihood. (I am having strenuously to fight my intuition, which is telling me that they are now *less* likely to come up.)