The WW2 Pigeon Cipher… probably isn’t in Slidex. :-(

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Today I received a nice little package of stuff from Holland, courtesy of Rob van Meel, who reprints old military manuals – mostly British, but a few American and German ones too. I get the impression these are mainly for people with an interest in reenactment / war games rather than historians and researchers per se, but given a healthy area of overlap there’s surely room for everyone at the table. 😉

Unsurprisingly, I was most interested in the various Slidex-related manuals Rob had, particularly an updated release of the Slidex manual dated 1st December 1944 (i.e. six months after D-Day). You see, Slidex originated as a system where operators used only a single letter for each of the twelve slots on the horizontal cursor: yet we have later examples where two letters went in each slot (and you could choose either one to signify that column).

If our pigeon cipher is a bigram cipher, then it is one that appears to use 24 letters in its horizontal cursor. So if it was enciphered using Slidex (which seems to be the code most widely used on D-Day), it would have to have used the two-letters-per-slot version. Hence the big question I wanted to try to answer was… when did the changeover from one-letter-per-slot to two-letters-per-slot Slidex happen?

However, going through the revised Slidex manual, it became abundantly clear to me that even in December 1944, the British Armed Forces were still using single-letter-per-slot Slidex, which would seem to rule out Slidex’s having been used in the pigeon cipher before 1945.

At the same time, the two pigeons were (according to their NURP references) born in 1937 and 1940: and the older of the two would have been right at the end of its carrying days in summer 1944, let alone in 1945. As a result, the Venn diagrammatic intersection of possibility (i.e. between the [old pigeon] circle and the [revised Slidex] circle) is shrinking all the time.

Right now, I don’t know what the answer to all this is: to my eyes, what we’re looking at seems a bit more like a bigram cipher than a machine cipher, but even that’s far from certain either way. All the ‘best’ cipher mysteries seem to take a somewhat sadistic pleasure in continuously oscillating either side of the shaky line between certain and uncertain, and this one is surely no exception.

Yet there were other low grade bigram ciphers in use during WW2: two in particular were an Air Support bigram cipher and a Royal Engineers syllabic cipher. These may well be the same two variants of the Syllabic Cipher introduced in 1942 as per Stu Rutter’s page, which I believe were known as BX 724 and BX 724/RE respectively.

I’ve already written to several army museums and archives asking if they have either of these, but so far without any luck. Any suggestions as to private collectors (or collections) who may have a copy of either? Unless you have a better idea, this would seem to be the next sensible thing to check, and the various National Archives files Stu & I checked didn’t seem to have any description of it at all.

In short: probably not Slidex, so remains a work in progress. 😉

Voynich pub meet with Klaus Schmeh on 7th March 2013…

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It’s been a while, but the time has finally come round for another Voynich London pub meet, on Thursday 7th March 2013 at the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping, a pub with its own gallows and noose (though admittedly these days it’s Somali pirates who get all the press rather than privateers). I’ll be there from 6pm onwards, hope to see some of you there too!

prospect-of-whitby

The reason for the weekday (i.e. not the usual Sunday) is that German cipher mystery skeptic Klaus Schmeh is over in the UK for a very few days & the 7th is the only evening he can squeeze into his packed schedule. I can’t change that and would like to catch up with him, so what’s a Cipher Mysteries blogger to do? Make do with the cards he’s dealt, that’s what… it is what it is.

This has, of course, been Schmeh Week on Cipher Mysteries, what with The Gentlemen’s Cipher from Klaus’ blog and this week’s diplomatic cipher conference in Gotha. So if (like me) you’d like to chat with Klaus about the conference, or perhaps chat with me about cipher stuff (if reading all my posts isn’t a rich enough diet for you), then feel free to swing along to Wapping. WW2 cipher pigeon fans welcome too! Cheers! 🙂

Historical Cryptography Conference in Gotha…

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Word just arrived here by breathless carrier pigeon (well, the little chap had flown from Italy, after all) about a conference in Gotha on 14th-16th February 2013 (yes, this very week!) on historical cryptography. And here’s the rather nice conference artwork:-

gotha-conference-small

Lots of interesting sessions on all manner of European historical stuff, such as from top Italian cipher-breaker Filippo Sinagra, who you may remember from the Nat Geo “Ancient X-Files” Voynich half-episode not so long ago. Filippo’s talk is on Sforza-era cryptography, for which he patiently trawled through the Milanese archives (he very kindly passed me scans a while back). Fascinating stuff that’s right up my street, I just wish I could be there (though sadly that’s not possible this particular time, oh well!)

There’s also a talk on historical code-breaking methodology (or, more accurately, the apparent lack of anything like one) being given by a certain German cipher skeptic – yes, it is indeed that man again, Klaus Schmeh. His introduction notes that: “Publications devoted to the particular methods of cryptanalysis regarding historical ciphers are rare. The presence of numerous works in which decrypted historic secret texts are presented should not obscure the fact that a comprehensive theory is lacking in this area.” Amen to that, Brother Klaus!

Another nice thing is that Christiane Schaefer will be discussing the Copiale Cipher (which she, Beáta Megyesi and Kevin Knight successfully broke) and her team’s follow-on project, an “interactive digital platform” called “CADMUS” for early modern cryptology. All of which sounds a lot like a call to European historians to send them your enciphered early modern documents and they’ll crack ’em… or you could just send them to me c/o Cipher Mysteries, that would work too. 😉

But perhaps the wild-card of the conference will prove to be Dr. Michael Korey, whose session is intriguingly entitled “Hidden steganography and burned substitution. Some little‐known cypher equipment from the cabinet of curiosities (Kunstkammer) of Dresden”. The description (which I hope it’s ok to reproduce here) goes like this:-

“In the middle of the 16th century, the German territories were considered to be not very progressive by foreign countries in regard to their ability to encrypt their messages or decrypt those sent by others. Matteo Argenti, secretary of cyphers at the Vatican, said the Germans and their neighbours understood so little about cyphers that they preferred to shred and burn the encoded dispatches they received instead of trying to decrypt them. In retrospect, this assessment seems quite premature, considering two pieces coming from the electoral Saxon cabinet of curiosities (Kunstkammer), that so far have not attracted much attention and will be presented here.”

It should be no surprise that I rather like the sound of that. Ummm… I hope someone takes a photo or two (hint, Klaus, *cough*). 🙂

For everyone going, I hope you have a great time, it looks like a great conference!

The Gentlemen’s Cipher, solved! :-)

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Because people keep telling me nice things about Klaus Schmeh’s recently-started blog Klausis Krypto Kolumne (and there’s you thinking you couldn’t read German, tcha!), I thought a visit was a little overdue.

The first thing I saw there was his brief page on the Gentlemen’s Cipher, a cipher taken from “the papers of a gentleman recently deceased”, and printed in “The Gentlemen’s Magazine” in April 1748. (It was mentioned in Cryptologia in 1978)

At first glance it seemed an awful lot like a simple (monoalphabetic) substitution cipher; and the repeated 3-gram at the start of lines 4 and 5 was probably “THE”; hence I thought it would probably be easy to break. So for a pleasant change, rather than just passing it on to Tony Gaffney Baloney to break while his half-full kettle boils (as per normal), I thought I’d instead transcribe it and try to solve it myself. Which I did.

In the end, though, all I actually did was paste my transcription into WebDecrypto, which got sufficiently close to the plaintext in a matter of seconds that I could Google it. It turned out to be nine lines from a 1699 poem by Sir Samuel Garth – “To die is landing on some silent shore / Where billows never break nor tempests roar / etc”. All of which is somewhat coincidental: so perhaps The Gentlemen’s Magazine’s correspondent “R.M.” who submitted the cryptogram was having a gentle laugh, having concocted the story of the “gentleman recently deceased”? I think so, but make of it what you will.

Anyway, if you want to see the whole thing, I’ve put up a short page describing The Gentlemen’s Cipher here. Case closed! 🙂

Helen Fouché Gaines’ challenge cipher…

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To add to our list of challenge ciphers (Bellaso’s, d’Agapeyeff’s, Feynman’s, etc), here’s one I hadn’t seen before from Helen Fouché Gaines’ (1956) “Cryptanalysis: A Study of Ciphers and Their Solution”, which I found courtesy of Greg Ross’s Futility Closet website:-

VQBUP PVSPG GFPNU EDOKD XHEWT IYCLK XRZAP
VUFSA WEMUX GPNIV QJMNJ JNIZY KBPNF RRHTB
WWNUQ JAJGJ FHADQ LQMFL XRGGW UGWVZ GKFBC
MPXKE KQCQQ LBODO QJVEL.

The cipher is the last in a series of exercises at the end of a chapter titled “Investigating the Unknown Cipher,” and she gives no hint as to its source. Of the exercises, she writes, “There is none in which the system may not be learned through analysis, unless perhaps the final unnumbered cryptogram.” The solution says simply “Unsolved.”

If you look at the book itself (p.217), all Gaines says is “Here is one which nobody has been able to decrypt:“. Hence it is not at all clear whether this is a composed challenge cipher (i.e. designed to confound) or an accidental challenge cipher (i.e. one found in the wild but never yet solved). I suspect the latter… but perhaps someone will know for sure either way.

Incidentally, the 1968 comment on this mentioned in the Futility Closet post is online here (it’s on p.5): just so you know, the authors there offer an [entirely fictional, I expect] “Nicodemus J. Grumbow award” for anyone solving it.

As far as the ciphertext itself goes, it has a flattish distribution (Q appears 9 times, while T & Y appear only twice each, all 26 letters are used), with a standard deviation of 1.52144, i.e. much flatter than a normal alphabet would present.

It has no repeated trigrams, while QJ & PN appear three times (DO, GW, QL, GG, VQ, PV, NU, NI and XR each appear twice). There are seven doubled letter-pairs, all appearing once only each (PP, GG, JJ, RR, WW, GG, QQ). There are a few visible patterns in the text that vaguely suggest some kind of structuring (JAJGJ, QCQQ, QLQ and QQL), but all of which might just be random.

As a result, it doesn’t appear to be a monoalphabetic substitution, nor a (conventional) polyalphabetic substitution (as there seems to be no obvious cycles, loops, or repeats). The cipher text is 125 characters long, which (as a mathematician) makes me idly wonder whether this was partly enciphered using some kind of a 5x5x5 three-dimensional transposition cipher, the sort of thing a Bond villain would gloat about in his/her evil monologue. I don’t believe for a minute that this is the case, of course, but I thought I’d mention it all the same. 🙂

Any thoughts? Is there anything that suggests to you what kind of a cipher this might be?

Slovakian Voynich facsimile edition (2012)…

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I found out today that Slovakian publisher CAD Press late last year brought out a new facsimile edition of the Voynich Manuscript, preceded by 176 pages reviewing its history, apparent contents, mad theories, etc. Of course, reading Czech helps, though it contains plenty of other pictures (i.e. quite apart from Voynich imagery) should you wish to buy it as an unreadable coffee table book. 😉

voynichuv-rukopis

As far as I can tell, the author of the preface (Dr. Jitka Lenková, I believe?) seems to be hopeful that the manuscript’s origin will ultimately turn out to be somewhere in Bohemia. Well, I guess a bit of nationalist spin rarely goes amiss with your home audience: but such rhetoric would be a bit nicer if it were accompanied by a bit of, errrm, factuality to back it up, hmmm?

And no, I don’t really think the Voynich has anything to do with Jan z Lazu, about whom I’ve blogged a fair few times. Sorry again!

The Massey twins’ Phaistos Disk decryption claim…

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I don’t often cover the Phaistos Disk here, simply because it’s almost certainly more of a linguistic mystery than a cipher mystery as such. However, I was particularly taken by some aspects of the analysis offered by Keith & Kevin Massey, so it seemed well worth discussing here.

Incidentally, despite their complementary-yet-competing philological interests, the twins didn’t start their Phaistos Disk adventure together. But, as they put it, “for Kevin to collaborate with his brother Keith was finally inevitable, like dancing with your mad aunt at a wedding reception.”

Their Chapters 1-4 summarize a whole load of Phaistos research, while trying to argue for a link between various early European scripts (Cypriotic, Linear B, etc). Their Chapter 5 (pp.48-56) argues for a left-to-right reading of the Phaistos Disk (but not quite as convincingly as they hope, I think). But after all that, their Chapter 6 discards pretty much all their preceding linguistic analysis and instead proposes the hypothesis that Phaistos Disk words with slashes are actually numbers. And that’s essentially where they finish.

Now, for all the twins’ obvious linguistic smarts, I have to say I just don’t buy into this – at least, not in the way it’s currently presented. And here’s my argument why:

(1) The way that the signs are physically imprinted / stamped into the soft unfired surface of the disk is clearly systematic (i.e. it’s a consciously prepared set of shapes, not one that’s being improvised on a shape-by-shape basis), and the choice of those shapes forms part of the same system.

(2) Furthermore, the whole disk had to be fired once and once only. Hence without much doubt the imprints on both sides had to have been made at the same time using the same basic system.

(3) Regardless of whatever direction you believe it was written in, there are substantial word differences between the two sides. Many words repeat on the same side (in fact, there’s even a three-word pattern that repeats on Side A), yet only a single measly three-imprint word repeats between sides.

(4) There is an imbalance between the shapes on the two sides. The most obvious difference is the frequency of the plumed head imprint: 14 instances on Side A but only 5 instances on Side B. Yet there are plenty of others, such as the beehive (once on Side A but five times on Side B). Indeed, the most visually striking difference is the twelve { PLUMED_HEAD + SHIELD } pairs on Side A compared to the single pair on Side B.

These are the basic observations I personally work from, and the problem is that I just don’t see how these square with the number system suggested by the Masseys. Whatever the actual significance of the slashes, it doesn’t seem to me to coincide with any obvious difference in the language as used (because the PLUMED_HEAD + SHIELD pairs occur just about as often in slashed words as in unslashed ones): and (longhand) numbers are almost always a notably differently-structured part of any language.

For me, the big issue is that Side A is significantly more structured and repetitive than Side B. Also, its word lengths have much greater variance (i.e. Side A has both longer and shorter words than are found on Side B), and they use a different mix of shapes. Yet slashed words occur just as often on both sides. I just don’t get it, me.

I suspect that Side A and Side B use different kinds of language (ritual, performative, poetic, pragmatic, whatever) to assist very different functions: and probably courtly functions at that. But seeing it as a homogeneous number container for (say) Cretan tax accounting seems far too mundane. Bean counters never touched this artefact, no they didn’t! 🙂

Some of my pigeon questions answered…

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A few days ago I posted a list of open questions about the dead cipher pigeon, really as a way of externalizing the annoyance I felt from knowing so few basic facts. To my great delight, Mike Moor from Melbourne and (well-known military history buff) Christos T. stepped forward with a whole wheelbarrowful of answers. And here they are…

“Did any British pigeon handlers ever use “lib.” as an abbreviation?”

Mike Moor points out that the first message sent back on D-Day was by Reuters reporter Montague Taylor, attached to the eg of the war-seasoned (and subsequently Dickin-Medal-receiving!) carrier pigeon Gustav [NPS.42.31066]. At the bottom of the image (clearly on an RAF pigeon message pad), it says “Liberated 0830” (click to see the full message):-

“Why can’t I find a single other message written on the same printed pigeon service pad?”

For this, Mike Moor points to a message sent by Major General Roberts on a page talking about the Canadian armed forces’ involvement in World War Two. [Incidentally, the abortive Canadian raid on Dieppe was known as “Operation Rutter”, I wonder if Stu R knew that?] Even though the quality of the scan is frankly diabolical, it’s very much better than nothing at all, and tells us that this our pigeon message was (without any real doubt) an Army Pigeon Service message pad.

Mike also notes that this was an “Army Book 418B”, the updated version of the Army Book 418 used for pigeon messages in the First World War. It turns out that the National Army Museum near Sloane Square tube in London has an Army Book 418B in its collection described as “Army Book 418B, Pigeon Service Message Book, 1942”, accession number “1975-06-35”: it would be cool to ask the curators there to have a closer look.

“Was the pigeon message we have a hectograph or a carbon copy?”

Mike Moor notes “It is a carbon copy pad with 1 original retained in the book and 2 carbon copies made – which lines up with what you’d expect from the message i.e. 2 copies sent and the blue text of the cipher looks a lot like a carbon copy + black amendments by a second hand presumably prior to sending.” Excellent, thanks! 🙂

“When did Slidex change from having one letter per horizontal key slot to two letters per slot?”

The (plainly utterly indefatigable) Mike Moor points us to some December 1944 Slidex instructions available on Rob van Meel’s site (a copy will cost you two euros plus international postage from the Netherlands), by which time it had changed to two letters per key slot on the horizontal cursor. That narrows the range down dramatically to ‘sometime in 1944’… we’ll just have to keep digging to find out exactly when in 1944. At least this is a question that we can reasonably hope to get a solid answer on!

“When were Slidex Series B code cards introduced?”

In the Series A “RE No. 2” (Army Code No. 14070) Card 35 that I got from the excellent royalsignals.org.uk website, the three columns have had their shape changed to break up the columnar structure somewhat, which I believe may point to a rethink & upgrade of the Slidex code during WW2.

At the same time, another Series A card has two versions, one with an Army code and another with a different W.O. (War Office) code, which I suspect points to a post-WW2 handover from the Army to the War Office. But that’s as good an answer as this question has for now.

“Did Bletchley Park / GCHQ ever catalogue the tons of files brought back by the TICOM teams?”

Christos replies: “There are many TICOM file categories: I, IF, DF, M, D. Captured German documents had to be catalogued and then translated. This must have taken years. The question is whether there is a full list of those files. There is a DF list but I don’t know about any document covering the other files.”

Incidentally, p.38 of TICOM I-109 (a report by Lt Ludwig of Chi Stelle OB.d.L) says:

B. Slidex system.

Bigram substitution system.
In use in the army (front line units) and in air support networks (tentacle networks).
The system was known from the monitoring of exercises in Great Britain before the invastion, e.g. “Spartan”. The cryptanalytic detachments in army and GAF were able to get so much experience on these exercises that decoding worked well right at the start of the invasion.
Recovery was done in the army again at NAA St 5, in the GAF in 14/3 (W control 3).
Decoding was often done with so little delay that the messages could be dealt with like clear text in the evaluation.
The results were of more importance to the army than to the GAF, but theu provided the latter too with valuable indications, e.g. elucisation of the individual corps tentacle networks, reconnaissance operations (e.g. 400 and 414 Squadrons) etc.
The messages decoded daily were exchanged between Army and GAF in the form of written reports.

At last, some genuinely useful Voynich merchandise hits eBay…

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A fulsome tip of the Cipher Mysteries hat to Luck Thief Luke Fitch for passing on a link to this (actually rather nice-looking, I think) Voynich-themed iPhone4 case shipped all the way from Hong Kong. Luke bought one for his girlfriend for Christmas “and she loves it“, thus proving once and for all that romance and cipher mysteries can indeed co-exist. (Though I’m not entirely sure my wife would 100% agree.)

As I’m sure at least 20% of Cipher Mysteries regulars will know, the image chosen is cropped from page f40v, the end page of the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 7. The plant depicted is very similar-looking to the (marginally better-known) plant on f33v, which Hugh O’Neill in 1944 thought was a “sunflower”: Robert Brumbaugh also thought this was the case (though much later).

However, because of a number of compelling counter-arguments raised by Jorge Stolfi, the whole sunflower notion now seems to have, errm, had its day in the sun. More recent alternatives include:-
* Dana Scott suggested in 2001 that it might be related to Epiphyllum oxypetalum;
* Edith Sherwood suggests Crocus vernus;
* Berj N. Ensanian suggests that comparisons with giant Pitcher plants present themselves.

What I can say is that it’s a Herbal ‘B’ page written (as usual) in Currier Hand 2, with a ‘title’ (offset text block) on the bottom-most line. There is only a single l-initial word (‘lar’), and a fair smattering of single-leg gallows. I don’t think its roots or leaves are repeated in either of the later pharma sections.

Even though this is quite vividly coloured, I don’t personally believe this is actually a plant… but that’s another story entirely! 🙂

Why so many open pigeony questions?

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As far as just about any cipher I blog about goes, I have days when a solution seems so comically close I could almost accidentally breathe it in. But I also have days when one seems so tragically far away that it may as well be in a sealed box. On the moon. Guarded by killer robot ninjas. All voiced by James Earl Jones.

What’s at issue isn’t anything like pessimism on my part: rather, it’s the question of why anybody would think these might be solvable without doing a whole load of basic, grindy, grafty research first. Really, I think you almost always have to break the external history of these things before you stand much of a chance of extracting their internal contents.

So, if I list some of the open questions that are bugging me about the dead cipher pigeon story right here right now, perhaps you’ll see why that might be the case:-

* Who owned either of the two pigeons listed on the message?
* Were there any pigeon lofts in Bletchingley itself during WW2?
* Did any British pigeon handlers ever use “lib.” as an abbreviation?
* Why hasn’t a single record from a pigeon loft around Tunbridge Wells or Dorking turned up yet?
* Why can’t I find a single other message written on the same printed pigeon service pad?
* Was the pigeon message we have a hectograph or a carbon copy?
* From its skeleton, how old was the dead pigeon? [What a basic question to have to ask!]
* True or false: “many WW2 pigeon messages were sent encrypted”?
* When were Slidex Series B code cards introduced?
* When did Slidex change from having one letter per horizontal key slot to two letters per slot?
* How many syllabic / bigram ciphers were in use in WW2?
* Where is a copy of the Army syllabic cipher book BX 724 or BX 724/RE?
* Did Bletchley Park / GCHQ ever catalogue the tons of files brought back by the TICOM teams?

Personally, when I look at this fairly long list, I don’t feel hugely confident that we genuinely know even close to enough to enable us to solve this mystery, however engaging and intriguing it may be.

But then again, a single answer to any one of these questions from an unexpected corner might well be enough on its own to turn this miserable tide around. So perhaps we should just try to remain optimistic, for a tiny bit of clarity for any one of these might be enough to get us started. Fingers crossed that we shall see (and very soon!)… 🙂