Review of “Cracking Codes & Cryptograms for Dummies”…

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With my book publisher hat on, I’d guess that the pitch for this book probably said: “Codes! Ciphers! Cryptograms! Masonic stuff! For Dummies!” And yes, the authors (Denise Sutherland and Mark E. Koltko-Rivera) pretty much seem to have delivered on that basic promise. But… is it any good?

Bear with me while I sketch out a triangle in idea-space. On the first vertex, I’ll put recreational code-breakers – the Sunday supplement sudoku crowd. On the second vertex, hardcore cipher history buffs – David Kahn groupies. On the last vertex, historical mystery / conspiracy fans – Templars, Masons, Turin Shroud, HBHG, Voynich Manuscript etc.

“Cracking Codes & Cryptograms for Dummies” sits firmly on the triangle’s first vertex, but I have to reaches out only fairly lamely (I think) to the other two vertices. Structurally, its innovation is to tell three stories where you need to solve a long sequence (100, 80, and 55 respectively) of individual cryptograms to find out what happened. Quite a few of the ciphers use well-known cipher alphabets, such as Malachim, Enochian, and various Masonic pigpens: there are also a few trendy puzzle ciphers (such as predictive texting ciphers formed just of numbers).

Compare this to its big competitor (Elonka Dunin’s “Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms”) which sits on the same first vertex. Elonka’s book has quite a few more puzzles, is structured both thematically and by ascending difficulty, and sticks to plaintext: it also has a 40-page section on unsolved ciphers (the VMs, the Dorabella Cipher, Phaistos Disk, etc), but with no real pretense at trying to precis Kahn’s “The Codebreakers”.

For me, Cipher Mysteries sits on the opposite edge of the triangle (i.e. between hardcore cipher history and, errm, softcore cipher mysteries) to both of these, so I’m probably not the right person to judge which of the two puzzle books is better. Elonka’s book is easy to work your way through (but feels a bit more old-fashioned): while Sutherland & Koltko-Rivera’s book is lithe and up-to-the-minute (but feels less substantial, in almost every sense). OK, the first is more cryptologic, the second more puzzle-y: but ultimately they’re doing the same thing and talking to the same basic audience.

Really, I guess puzzle book buyers would do well to buy both and make up their own mind which of the two they prefer: but sadly I have to say that most Cipher Mysteries readers might prefer to buy neither. But you never know!

Review of Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol”…

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In “The Lost Symbol”, Dan Brown takes his “symbologist” non-hero Robert Langdon on a high-speed twelve-hour tour around Washington. Broadly speaking, it’s like riding pillion on a jetbike driven by a demented architectural historian screaming conspiratorial travelogue descriptions into your ears via a radio-mike. But you probably guessed that already. 🙂

In fact, because you all thought your other questions exactly at the same time (which allegedly multiplies their power exponentially, asserts the book), here are the answers to them:-

  • Yes, it’s formulaic as hell (and po-faced throughout)
  • Yes, it’s a swift read (and for that I truly am grateful)
  • Yes, Dan Brown does flag his ‘big’ plot twist 300 pages too early
  • No, there are no sex scenes (which is probably just as well)
  • No, Robert Langdon is exactly as undeveloped as he was in the Da Vinci Code
  • Yes, the “Noetic Science” angle is just nonsense (and unlike most reviewers, I’ve read Lynne McTaggart’s “The Field”, which is what Dan Brown claimed as his inspiration)

The big reversal of expectations here is that, for a change, the Masons are not “The Conspiracy Behind All The Bad Stuff”. Actually, they’re the patsy good-guys, guarding some kind of mysterious symbolic treasure trove they don’t really understand, while All The Bad Stuff spirals out of control around them. In fact, because Dan Brown spends most of the novel stressing how darn nice the Masons are, and how they espouse a kind of universally-benign syncretist meta-religion (like apron-wearing Rastafari, De Trut’ In All Trut’s), his whole project comes over like a colossally misjudged Masonic recruiting handbook. Join us, we’re ancient and have obscure dippy rituals, but we Do Good Works, so that’s OK. Oh, and the Shriners are a joke, got that?

“So what’s your problem with that, Nick?”, I hear you saying. Well… even though Robert Langdon is notionally a “symbologist” (a made-up term that broadly matches iconographer / iconologist, if you don’t examine it too closely), he is still basically an academic historian, right? Hence, what I just don’t get from start to finish is how you can square his being a proper historian with his supposed near-obsessive interest in the kind of hallucinogenic pseudo-history clap-trap that Masonic historians have spent centuries punting out. For every one genuine story in the canon, there are a hundred fake ones: which is a lousy hit rate to be dealing with, even for a symbologist.

It’s true that the inconvenient truth behind the history of History is that it did start out as an exercise in adapting or falsifying marginal evidence to support otherwise untenable ideological claims… apologetics, by any other name. And it is also true that the various Washington monuments are indeed filled with a kind of cheerfully jaunty Man-As-Technological-God secular myth-making – mythopoiesis (if that’s not too scary a word). But as for Langdon buying in to any of it? Doesn’t work for me, sorry.

Actually, I think Langdon’s key attribute (his eidetic memory) is a ‘tell’ for what Brown uses him for – an historical memory machine, a robotic repository able to dredge up every wonky numerological / etymological / mythological fantasy ever devised, while remaining indifferent to all of them. Langdon doesn’t need to feel love, or loyalty, or lust: his mind is a blank canvas, doodled upon by X thousand years of cultural graffiti artists. Even though at one point Brown has a brief chuckle at the Wiki-esque shallow learning of modern students, Langdon himself functions as nothing more complex than a disbelieving walking Wikipedia of the occult and marginal… an erudite ‘conspirapedia’ to help fatten up the page count by a couple of hundred pages or so.

As for what Brown does with all those references… Cipher Mysteries readers should know by now that any time you see (say) John Dee, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and (my personal favourite anti-subject) the Rosicrucians come up, you’re normally in the presence of someone fairly credulous – and sadly Brown (who namechecks these and dozens of other similar figures) never gives the impression of being alert enough to stay wise to the historical perils these present. Ghastly.

But what of “The Lost Symbol”‘s cryptography? Well… there’s a little bit of Masonic pigpen (though the fact that simple pigpens can be rotated seems to have been overlooked); the final “substitution” cipher is actually more steganographic than cryptographic; yet there’s some nice stuff on magic squares (no, not magic circles). And that’s about it. All the same, though fairly skimpy, this actually fills me with a deep sense of relief – relief that Brown didn’t try to be too clever-clever with the historical crypto side of things, for which (I’m sorry to say) he clearly doesn’t have much of a feel. Yes, the Dorabella Cipher, the Voynich Manuscript, and even the Kryptos sculpture get flagged: but these are not the main deal.

For me, the worst part of the whole book by a mile is the lack of any functional intimacy or closeness between any of the characters – even though I do appreciate that a lot of technical craft has gone into its plotting and overall construction, 500 pages is a long way to drive without any emotional attachments or transformation to help the reader along. This prolonged drabness caps even The Da Vinci Code’s sustained emotional superficiality: unfortunately… given how bad a film that first book got turned into, I truly shudder at the thought of how bad a film “The Lost Symbol” promises to be. Having done a fair bit of screenwriting myself, I can say that some story problems just can’t be fixed without major, major surgery… and this would seem to have plenty.

Dan Brown and the Dorabella Cipher…

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Apparently, Chapter 41 of “The Lost Symbol” namechecks a handful of cipher mysteries, which probably explains the Dorabella Cipher search query spike I noticed over the last few days. So, a minor mystery solved (for a change), I’d guess:-

“…after [Langdon’s] experiences in Rome and Paris, he’d received a steady flow of requests asking for his help deciphering some of history’s great unsolved codes—the Phaistos Disk, the Dorabella Cipher, the mysterious Voynich Manuscript.”

Of course, only a cryptological schmuck taking Elonka’s famous list of unsolved codes & ciphers at face value would put Dorabella right up there with the VMs – so that must have been added by the copy-editors, right?

PS: here’s a recent blog entry on a proposed solution to the Dorabella Cipher.

Dorabella latest news…

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In the last two days, Cipher Mysteries has had a spate of (mainly American) visitors looking for things related to the Dorabella Cipher, so perhaps a TV documentary on Elgar has just aired there? Please leave a comment if you happen to know what triggered this mini-wave, I’d be interested to know!

Anyway, it would seem to be time to discuss a recently-proposed solution (it’s #12 on this page) to the Dorabella Cipher by Tim Roberts, whose interesting unsolvedproblems.org site you may have seen along the way (George Hoschel Jr’s Voynich “cookbook” solution is there, for example). Here’s his suggested cipher key (rearranged slightly for the CM blog layout):-

ladypenny-key

Applying this key to the ciphertext yields something like…

P.S. Now drocp beige weeds set in it – bu
re idiocy – one endtire bed! Luigi Ccibu
nud lu'ngly tuned liuto studo two.

…which Tim Roberts interprets as…

P.S. Now droop beige weeds set in it – pure idiocy – one entire bed!
Luigi Ccibunud lovingly tuned liuto studo two.

He adds a number of notes (for example, that “Luigi Cherubini was a famous Italian composer who was admited by Elgar“) and conjectures (“that Dora may have stumbled over the name […] and Elgar was teasing her a little“) to support his key and reading: but I’ll instead be mainly focusing on teasing out my own cipher / cryptological commentary.

Firstly, it should be pointed out that even though there would seem to be 8 x 3 = 24 possible letters in the cipherbet, only twenty of them appear in the (all-too brief) ciphertext. Hence four of the letters in the key phrase here are completely conjectural…

L - D P E N N Y
W R - T I G I C
 O S U - B Y W -

…and so his proposed plaintext omits the letters A, F, H, J, K, M, P, Q, V, X, Z. (Note that in the clever spreadsheet he uses, cell K9’s lookup formula for the “u” in “lungly” has been hacked to read “v”, so revert it to =LOOKUP(K8,$C$5:$D$28) if you plan to use this yourself to try stuff out).

Of course, the oddest factor here is the absence of the letter A. Though George Perec’s (1969) “La Disparition” and its English translation “A Void” are well-known examples of novels without the letter “E”, Perec was actually inspired by Ernest Vincent Wright’s (1939) E-less “Gadsby“: even so, that was still some years later than Elgar. Incidentally, writing constrained by an arbitrary rule is known as a lipogram, and people keep writing them: apparently Adam Adams’ (2008) novel “Unhooking a DD-Cup Bra Without Fumbling” is E-free. Not something Ebeneezer Goode would appreciate… 🙂

Secondly, the way that certain letters within the claimed cipher key recur makes me rather uneasy. “I” appears five times (the last two are removed), “N” appears four times (the last two are removed) while “Y” appears three times (the first and last are removed).

Tim Roberts tries to counter these objections (see here), but I have to say that even if you can get from “LADYPENNYWRITINGINCODEISSUCHBUSYWORK” to “LADPENNY” – “WRITIGIC” – “OSUHBYWK”, it does still seem rather arbitrary to me.

Thirdly, though the “L-DPENNY” set of eight starts out with a nice anticlockwise rotational pattern (U, L, D, R), this clips to clockwise in the second half (UL, UR, DR, DL); similarly, “WR-TIGIC” runs anticlockwise (R, U, L, D) followed by a non-rotational set (UR, DR, UL, DL); while “OSU-BYW-” jumps all over the place (R, L, UL, DL, DR, U, D, UR).

So, even if Dora Penny had been given the correct cipher key, how on earth would she ever have guessed the order of the ciphertext letters to go with it? Yes, short subsections of it are ordered: but why on earth would the letters not have matched the eight natural sequential rotation positions?

* * * * * * *

OK: it should be clear from the above that I don’t think this is the solution – sorry, Tim. All the same, I think that there is a genuinely good idea here lurking here: which is that perhaps the cipher key is a phrase written down as is (i.e. without any duplicate letters removed). Though impractical for a long plaintext, this might be fine for a short plaintext such as the Dorabella ciphertext. In which case, we have only 16 (8 clockwise + 8 anticlockwise, assuming it matches 1 loops, 2 loops, 3 loops in turn) basic sets of frequency curves to match candidate key phrases to:

5 3 5 2 3 7 4 0 / 11 4 1 2 6 8 1 0 / 8 1 0 7 4 1 0 4
0 5 3 5 2 3 7 4 / 0 11 4 1 2 6 8 1 / 4 8 1 0 7 4 1 0
4 0 5 3 5 2 3 7 / 1 0 11 4 1 2 6 8 / 0 4 8 1 0 7 4 1
(etc)

Something to think about, anyway! 😮

450-year-old challenge cipher cracked!

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In the 1564 printed edition of his cryptography manual, Giovan Battista Bellaso included seven challenge ciphers for his readers to break, along with a set of clues: these all remained unbroken and in obscurity until Augusto Buonafalce wrote about them in 1997, 1999, and 2006 in the journal Cryptologia.

But that’s all changed now!

Tony Gaffney – who Cipher Mysteries regulars should remember from his book “The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers” (under the nom-de-plume ‘Jean Palmer’), his reading of the Dorabella cipher, and his corrections to the Bellaso cipher transcriptions – has managed to crack Bellaso Challenge Cipher #6, despite the handicap of not actually being able to read Italian. 🙂

Here’s the ciphertext in question (with Tony’s starting point highlighted), followed by a description (based closely on the document he posted to the Ancient Cryptography forum) of how he used that to begin solving the entire cryptogram. (Incidentally, if this all comes across a bit like a kind of linguistic Sudoku, it’s because that’s essentially how most non-machine code-breaking is done)…

DP QBGTA ITP LBIEE DFIIHO LI AQILIFF SO NILEECHL OMGTTIE=
CZXRC CGEDFLLIILBGGP PLBBIUNO UL QURNXSRRNB OR ACFEDFLL=
ILBFI PLACFODACU AP UHEEOI PLSGGAOLRIBLNGIBLNPE SO ROCDBCG
BU PCLICB MR RBERPUGSTSLB PLACFOEXBUBLB BPSPDXG QU BDUU
DCCAGE FCFXSFP HP MBHI LH EOMGU FSDDHEIJMG FPDHQMPDD.

Having a repeated block of four letters five letters apart implied that the cipher system involves cycling through five different cipher alphabets: and so Tony trawled through Bellaso’s clues looking “for any word that had a period 5 repetition in it ie. lontano; riteovata; lequale; etc.” When he hit the very promising-looking word consequentemente, he lined that up with the ciphertext letters with the cycle numbers beneath:-

??consequentemente??
PLSGGAOLRIBLNGIBLNPE
12345123451234512345

There’s a problem here, in that in alphabet #4 ‘G’ appears to encipher both ‘o’ and ‘m’: yet because most printed ciphers suffer from typesetter errors, Tony ignored this and marched bravely onwards. 🙂

His next two steps forward were to notice (a) that the second letter in the group shown must be ‘t’ (it occurs in cycle #2 in the same word) and (b) the final letter must be ‘i’ (because ‘e’ is its reciprocal in cycle #5 – Bellaso was fond of reciprocal ciphers, i.e. ones that perform both the ciphering and the deciphering) – so, guessing that the first letter is ‘e’, the above section of ciphertext resolves to ‘et consequentement ?i‘

Observing that plaintext ‘e’ appears to get enciphered as P in #1; O in #2; N in #3; and I in #5, Tony’s next angle was to rely on the five cycling alphabets’ probably having some kind of symmetry – in particular, because P O N are all a single alphabetical step away from each other, he thought it likely that the bottom half of the alphabet was shifting along by one place in each cycle. This guess let him start to fill out the 5 cycles in more detail:-

????b?e?g??? 1
????nop?????
????b?e?g??? 2
?????nop????
????b?e?g??? 3
??????nop???
????b?e?g??? 4
???????nop??
????b?e?g??? 5
????????nop?

Where next? Well, Tony now turned his gaze on a second repeated feature in the cryptogram, which appeared to be two words formed from the same linguistic root, but with a different prefix and suffix each. Did he now have enough letters to solve this? He decided to give it a go regardless:-

ACFEDFLLILBFI &
 CGEDFLLIILBGGP
??o???????????   ???o???t?????
CGEDFLLIILBGGP & ACFEDFLLILBFI
51234512345123   5123451234512
??o???t???n???   s?????tq??n??
CGEDFLLIILBGGP & ACFEDFLLILBFI
12345123451234   1234512345123
?????tq?????o?   ?s????q??????
CGEDFLLIILBGGP & ACFEDFLLILBFI
23451234512345   2345123451234
so???q???t?one   ???p?????t???
CGEDFLLIILBGGP & ACFEDFLLILBFI
34512345123451   3451234512345
?np??????q????   ???o?????q???
CGEDFLLIILBGGP & ACFEDFLLILBFI
45123451234512   4512345123451

Looking at the fourth set, he wondered if ‘t?one‘ might well be ‘tione‘, and so tried them both “as if they were the same word”. Removing the extra I from the first word yields:-

?np?????tione   ???p?????ti??
CGEDFLLILBGGP & ACFEDFLLILBFI
4512345123451   3451234512345

His original table for #3 maps ‘e?g‘ to ‘nop‘ so it seemed entirely possible that ‘F’ might encipher ‘o’: and so guessed that this word was something along the lines of the word ‘proportion‘:-

?n proportione   ??? proporti??
CG EDFLLILBGGP & ACF EDFLLILBFI
45 12345123451   345 1234512345

Working with the code-breakers’ two secret weapons (controlled mistakenness, allied with bloodyminded persistence), Tony moved forwards, safe in the knowledge that if his guesses were significantly wrong his errors would soon present themselves. How much of the five alphabets did he now have?

??r?b?efgl?? #1
??i?nopqt???
??r?b?efgl?? #2
??di?nopqt??
??r?b?efgl?? #3
????i?nopqt?
??r?b?efgl?? #4
??u??i?nopqt
??r?b?efgl?? #5
??t???i?nopq

He now moved on to the next weakest link in the ciphertext, a long group of letters (‘RBERPUGSTSLB‘) that he thought might well now be solvable with the letters he had:-

i?nu??qc????  di??e?p??ati  ??iif?o?g?q?  u?pdgrnalcp?  ?no?l?t???on
RBERPUGSTSLB  RBERPUGSTSLB  RBERPUGSTSLB  RBERPUGSTSLB  RBERPUGSTSLB
123451234512  234512345123  345123451234  451234512345  512345123451

Pleasingly, ‘distemperati‘ seemed to fit the second version (‘di??e?p??ati’): and so he proceeded with all the remaining words in the challenge cipher.

Tony’s final plaintext (parallel with the ciphertext, and the matching cycle numbers) looks like:-

della giors cre ticip rocede qualche ilcorpo nostro ecoposto
DP    QBGTA ITP LBIEE DFIIHO LI      AQILIFF SO     NILEECHL
      23451 451 23451 234512         2345123        34512345
etorganizato inpropor tione musicabe poi maicretici sono
OMGTTIECZXRC CGEDFLLIILBGGP PLBBIUNO UL  QURNXSRRNB OR
23451234-451 45123451*23451 51234512     4512345123
disproportine etdiscrdia nella musica etconsequenteoenteli nostro
ACFEDFLLILBFI PLACFODACU AP    UHEEOI PLSGGAOLRIBLNGIBLNPE SO
3451234512345 1234512345       234512 12345123451234512345
uloriin quella giorni sono distemperati etdiscordanti ilferro inogni
ROCDBCG BU     PCLICB MR   RBERPUGSTSLB PLACFOEXBUBLB BPSPDXG QU
4512345        345123      234512345123 1234512345123 3451234
sara condoi soprese della vite per petoa saratirato serumpera
BDUU DCCAGE FCFXSFP HP    MBHI LH  EOMGU FSDDHEIJMG FPDHQMPDD.
2345 512345 5123451       2345     12345 5123451234 512345123

Bellaso appears (as per his book) to be using two letter groups to stand in for common words:

  • DP — della
  • LI — mille/qualche
  • SO — no macati e sequir/quanto/ve habiamo/scritto/nostro
  • UL — vostra/poi
  • OR — perilche/sono
  • AP — della/nella
  • BU — ditto/quella
  • MR — il vostro/sono
  • QU — quella/inogni
  • HP — della/imperoche
  • LH — intutto/per

Finally, Tony notes – “I am greatly indebted to Augusto Buonafalce for his help in translating some of the words and supplying me with copies of his English translations of the books.”

The plaintext refers to Bellaso’s clue #8, and discusses the well being of the body at different times, which could well refer to the theories of the Renaissance astrologer Andrea Argoli.

All I can really say is that I think this is a splendid achievement, and I wish Tony the very best of luck with the other challenge ciphers! Excellent, well done! 🙂

Is Dorabella a rotating pigpen…?

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Spurred on by a blog comment left this morning, I wondered whether the Dorabella cipher might actually (because of the symmetry of its cipherbet shapes) be some kind of rotating pigpen cipher, where you rotate each of the positions around after each letter. This would be a bit like a “poor man’s Alberti cipher disk”… just the sort of thing a self-taught cipher hacker such as Elgar might devise.

And so, I decided (being a programmer) to code it up. Of course, it didn’t appear to solve it (these things never do), but I thought I’d post my C code here anyway. Enjoy!

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
char dorabella[] =
 "BLTACEIARWUNISNFNNELLHSYWYDUO"
 "INIEYARQATNNTEDMINUNEHOMSYRRYUO"
 "TOEHOTSHGDOTNEHMOSALDOEADYA";
#define ELEMENTS(N) (sizeof(N) / sizeof(*(N)))
#define DORABELLA_SIZE (ELEMENTS(dorabella) - 1) // trim the trailing zero!
void dorabella_encipher(int c, int *row, int *column)
{
 if (c >= 'V')
  c--;
 if (c >= 'J')
  c--;
 c -= 'A';  // c now equals 0..23
 *column = c % 8;
 *row    = c / 8;
}
int dorabella_decipher(int row, int column)
{
 int c = (row * 8 ) + column;  // space inserted to stop smiley being inserted!
 c += 'A';
 if (c > 'I')
  c++;
 if (c > 'U')
  c++;  // c now equals 'A'..'Z'
 return c;
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
 int i, j, c;
 int row, column;
 int step_size = 1;
 if (argc > 1)
  step_size = atoi(argv[1]);
 for (i=0; i<8; i++)
 {
  printf("C%d: ", i);
  for (j=0; j<DORABELLA_SIZE; j++)
  {
   dorabella_encipher(dorabella[j], &row, &column);
   column += i + (j / step_size);
   while (column < 0)
    column += 8;
   column %= 8;
   c = dorabella_decipher(row, column);
   printf("%c", c);
  }
  printf("\n");
 }
 for (i=0; i<3; i++)
 {
  printf("R%d: ", i);
  for (j=0; j<DORABELLA_SIZE; j++)
  {
   dorabella_encipher(dorabella[j], &row, &column);
   row += i + (j / step_size);
   while (row < 0)
    row += 3;
   row %= 3;
   c = dorabella_decipher(row, column);
   printf("%c", c);
  }
  printf("\n");
 }
 return 0;
}

New Dorabella Cipher page…

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Spurred on by a blog comment left here earlier today by musician / piano teacher (and Elgar buff, no doubt) Liz May, who very kindly noted that…

Dora Penny’s favourite song at the time of the Dorabella Code in 1897 would possibly have been “Lullaby” from the six choral songs by Elgar, entitled “From the Bavarian Highlands” (1896).  […] Dora describes in her book “Memories of a variation” how she enjoyed dancing to the Lullaby while Elgar played it on the piano. 

…, I decided to post (finally!) the Dorabella Cipher page I’ve been twiddling with for a while. It’s a bit of an historian’s take on the cipher (how comes I’ve never cited Marc Bloch before?), but it’s a nice little piece all the same, hope you enjoy it! 🙂

All about the Chaocipher…

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I’m getting a bit cheesed off with the Internet: every time I do a search for anything Cipher Mysteries-ish, it seems that half Google’s hits are for ghastly sites listing “Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries” or “10 Most Bizarre Uncracked Codes“. Still, perhaps I should be more grateful to the GooglePlex that I’m not getting “Top 10 Paris Hilton Modesty Tips” and its tawdry ilk.

Realistically, there is only one uncracked code/cipher listing on the web from which all the rest get cut-and-pasted: Elonka’s list of famous unsolved codes and ciphers. But Elonka Dunin has long since moved on (coincidentally, she went from cryptography into computer game production at about the same time that I made the reverse journey), which is perhaps why all of these lists look a bit dated. Perhaps I should do my own list soon (maybe, if I had the time).

Happily, Elonka did manage to nail most of the usual suspects: the Beale Papers, the Voynich Manuscript, Dorabella, Zodiac Killer, d’Agapeyeff, Phaistos Disk, and so on… each typically a piece of ciphertext which we would like to decipher in order to crack a historical mystery. However, one of the items on her list stands out as something of an exception.

For John F. Byrne’s 1918 “Chaocipher”, we have a description of his device (the prototype fitted in a cigar box, and allegedly contained two wheels with scrambled letters), and a fair few examples of both Chaocipher ciphertext and the matching plaintext. So, the mystery isn’t so much a whodunnit as a howdunnit. Though a small number of people are in on the secret mechanism (Lou Kruh, for one), Byrne himself is long dead: and the details of how his box of tricks worked have never been released into the public domain.

Was Byrne’s Chaocipher truly as unbreakable as he believed, or was it no more than the grand delusion of an inspired cryptographic outsider? This, really, is the mystery here – the everything-or-nothing “hero-or-zero” dramatic tension that makes it a good story. Yet hardly anybody knows about it: whereas “Voynich” gets 242,000 hits, “Chaocipher” only merits 546 hits (i.e. 0.0022% as much).

Well, now you know as well: and if you want to know a little more about its cryptography, I’ve added a Chaocipher page here. But the real site to go to is Moshe Rubin’s “The Chaocipher Clearing House“, which is so new that even Google hasn’t yet found it (Moshe emailed me to tell me about it, thanks!) Exemplary, fascinating, splendid – highly recommended. 🙂

OK, enough of the raw factuality, time for the obligatory historical riff. 🙂

I’m struck by the parallels between John Byrne’s device and Leon Battista Alberti’s cipher wheel. Both men seem to have caught the leading edge of a wave and tried to harness its power for cryptography, and made high-falutin’ claims as to their respective cipher systems’ unbreakability: whereas Alberti’s wave was mathematical abstraction, Byrne’s wave was (very probably) algorithmic computing.

Circa 1920, this was very much in the air: when J. Lyons & Co. hired the mathematician J.R.M. Simmons in 1923, the company was thinking about machines, systems, and operational management: mathematical calculators were absolutely de rigeur for them. The first Enigma machines were constructed in the early 1920s (and used in a commercial environment), and there were doubtless many other broadly similar machines being invented at the same time.

Do I think that there was anything unbreakable in Byrne’s box? No, not really: the real magic in there was most likely a programmatic mindset that was cutting-edge in 1918, but might well look somewhat simplistic nearly a century later. But I could be wrong! 😉

Review of “The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers”…

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A few days ago, chess-playing crypto guy Tony Gaffney emailed Cipher Mysteries about “The Subtelty Of Witches” in the British Library: I also blogged about his attempted solution to the Dorabella Cipher and the (not-very-)Ancient Cryptography forum where he often posts on historical ciphers. Since then, the copy of his 2005 book “The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers” (which he wrote under the byline “Jean Palmer”) I ordered has arrived… but is it any good?

(Incidentally, “agony columns”  in Victorian newspapers were originally for readers to post personal announcements and messages about/for missing friends and relatives: while “advice columns” (which became popular in the 1950s) were actually a continuation of an eighteenth century newspaper feature known as “letters to the lovelorn“, as well as the advice column in popular magazine “The Lady’s Monthly Museum”. All of which means that the phrase “agony aunt” is a kind of uneasy linguistic marriage between two quite different types of newspaper column.)

People liked the ability to leave messages in agony columns: but some,  wishing to remain anonymous, submitted their messages in code, in cipher, or in some other cryptic manner. Tony’s book collects together 1000 of these (simultaneously public and private) messages.

On the one hand, I can well appreciate the compositional agony of transcribing so many ciphertexts (which themselves may well have been scrambled by harried typesetters) and then trying to decipher them (which may not always be possible). I can also appreciate that a collection of these could well offer a nice commuter alternative to the sheer maddening pointlessness of Sudoku (oh look, all the numbers add up… and here’s my station).

On the other hand, who (apart from cipher history junkies such as me) would really connect with the content of such a project? Stripped of background, context, and outcome, the results are – if you go through your own agony of deciphering them – typically no more than fleeting half-scenes from lost Victorian soap operas, full of thwarted & hopeful love and clandestine meetings.

Structurally, the book comprises a series of dated cipher fragments sorted into chapters according to the newspaper in which they appeared (The Times, The Morning Chronicle/Observer, etc) and sorted by date, with a cipher key listed at the end for most (but not all) of the enciphered ones. All very logical and sequential as a reference work: but does it really work as a piece of cipher solving entertainment?

With my historical cryptography hat on, I’d say yes: the reader is presented with a cleaned up set of cipher transcriptions, with exactly as much information as a curious newspaper reader of the day would have had. It’s straightforward and clear, a nice little slice of cipher history.

But with my publisher hat on, I’d say no: as an editor, I would have discarded the merely cryptic, and rearranged the same material as a series of enciphered threads graded by difficulty, so that a commuter could engage with it as if it were a cipher puzzle-book. I’d also have opted for a larger page size, and included pre-printed solving grids and a sorted frequency count for all monoalphabetic ciphers.

(A fine example of this kind of cipher puzzle book is Elonka Dunin’s (2006) “The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms”, which also briefly describes the Voynich Manuscript on pp. 489-493, as well as the Beale Papers, the Dorabella Cipher, the Zodiac Ciphers, and the Phaistos Disk).

I would also have moved all the (currently) unsolved ciphers to an end chapter, together with brief failed solving notes.

On balance, then, I’d say that the cipher historian side of me enjoyed the book, but the cipher puzzler side of me felt frustrated by its structure. However, because I would guess that cipher puzzlers outnumber cipher historians 100:1, perhaps it might be an idea for Tony to revisit this project, to Elonka-ify it?

“Ancient Cryptography” forum…

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Tony Gaffney, a chess player / tournament organizer I knew back in the early 1980s when playing for Hackney Chess Club, made some fascinating comments to my recent blog post on The Subtelty of Witches and Eric Sams’ attempted solution to the Dorabella Cipher.

Firstly: having spent a looong time in the British Library looking at ciphers (you’ll see why shortly), Tony was happy to tell me that it in fact has three encrypted books, all using simple monoalphabetic ciphers:
(1) MS Add. 10035 “The Subtelty of Witches” (Latin plaintext),
(2) Shelfmark 4783.a.30. “Ebpob es byo Utlub, Umgjoml Nýflobjof, etc. (Order of the Altar, Ancient Mysteries to which females were alone admissible: being part the first of the Secrets preserved in the Association of Maiden Unity and Attachment.)” London, 1835. (English plaintext)
(3) Shelfmark 944.c.19. “Nyflobjof es Woflu” (Mysteries of Vesta), pp.61, London 1850 (?). (English plaintext).

Secondly: without realising it, I had already seen an early version of Tony’s own proposed Dorabella decipherment in the comments to the Elgar article on the BBC Proms website, attributed to one “Jean Palmer”. You see, back in 2006, this was the pseudonum Tony used to write (and POD publish through authorsonline) a book containing a thousand (!) furtively ciphered messages that were placed in (mainly Victorian) newspapers’ personal columns: I shall (of course) post a review of this “Agony Column Codes & Ciphers” here once my freshly-printed copy arrives.

It turns out that Tony is also a frequent poster (under the name “Tony Baloney”) to an online code/cipher cracking forum called Ancient Cryptography I was previously unaware of (probably because its definition of “ancient” seems to extend only as far back as 1450, Bible Codes [pah!] excepted). The forum has specific threads devoted to the d’Agapeyeff Cipher, the Beale Papers, Zodiac Killer Ciphers, and the Kryptos Sculpture (for example), as well as some delightful oddities such as a link to recordings of shortwave Numbers Station broadcasts (coded intelligence messaging). If you want a friendly online forum for discussing attempts to break these historical ciphers, this seems like a sensible place to go.

But back to Tony Gaffney: given that he deciphered a thousand (admittedly mainly monoalphabetic substitution) messages, it should be clear that he is no slouch on the decrypting front. Which is why it is interesting to lookat the latest version of his proposed solution to the Dorabella Cipher. As far as I can tell, this involves simply using exactly the same cipher crib as appears in Elgar’s notebook (?), but interpreting the text that comes out as having been written in a kind of phonetic-style backslang. Here are the two stages (note that the hyphens are inserted as part of the interpretation, not part of the transcription):-

Deciphered:  B-ltac-ei-a-rw-unis-nf-nnellhs-yw-ydou
Anagrammed:  B-lcat-ie-a-wr-usin-fn-nshllen-wy-youd
Plaintext:   B hellcat i.e. a war using effin' henshells(en)? why your
 
Deciphered:  inieyarqatn-nte-dminuneho-m-syrr-yuo
Anagrammed:  intaqraycin-net-dminuenho-m-srry-you
Plaintext:   antiquarian net diminuendo?? am sorry you
 
Deciphered:  toeh-o-tsh-gdo-tneh-m-so-la-doe-ad-ya
Anagrammed:  theo-o-ths-god-then-m-so-la-deo-da-ay
Plaintext:   theo o' tis god then me so la deo da aye

On the one hand, I’d say it is more plausible than Eric Sams’ proposed solution: but on the (inevitably negative) other hand, it doesn’t quite manage to summon the kind of aha-ness (AKA “smoking-gunitude“) you’d generally hope for – as Tony’s book no doubt amply demonstrates, the point of a secret love note (which is surely what Elgar seems to have sent Dora Penny?) is to be both secret and to convey something which could not openly be said. But is this really it?

Some people like to say that the real point of tackling apparently unbreakable ciphers is to be found in the travelling rather than in the arriving – that the real prize is what we learn about ourselves from butting our horns against that which is impossible. To which I say: gvdl zpv, bttipmf.