The new golden age of decipherment

Abstract

In the second issue of Cryptologia, way back in 1977, a contributor noted, “The golden age of decipherment may have been the first half of the nineteenth century, when the ancient tongues of the Near East were loosened.” This, of course, refers to writings that were not intended for secrecy, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, but became unreadable when the last humans familiar with these scripts died. Some such scripts remain unreadable today, but progress is being made. A notable recent example is “The Decipherment of Linear Elamite Writing” by François Desset, Kambiz Tabibzadeh, Matthieu Kervran, Gian Pietro Basello, and Gianni Marchesi. But there’s a new and different golden age of decipherment that we are presently in the midst of, namely the recovery of messages intended to be kept secret and therefore hidden behind the best ciphers of the time. Custom computer programs often play a key role in such decipherments. The first issue of Cryptologia contained an article on an old, but only recently broken, cipher: “Poe Challenge Cipher Finally Broken.” A computer wasn’t used in this particular recovery, but the second issue of Cryptologia featured the piece “Automated Analysis of Cryptograms.” As the editor-in-chief of Cryptologia, the submission categories that bring me the greatest pleasure deal with cryptanalysis. While I enjoy seeing attacks on any system, my absolute favorite is when the attack is not merely theoretical, but actually reveals messages of some historic interest. That is, modern cracking of historical ciphers, typically made possible by clever computer programs. Examples, span the centuries. There are solutions to a cipher created by Trithemius and hidden in plain sight in his book Steganographia for hundreds of years, ciphers from other famous