Unbreakable – Cryptography

Feeble Attempts

On September 17, 2019

People say love is the most powerful force on Earth, and if that is the case, then the lure of money is an extremely close second. The Beale Papers basically gave an open invitation to a $20 million treasure (over $500 million in today’s money!) just with a catch– decipher some unbreakable ciphers. With that much money at stake and enough desperation, no task seems too large.

I agree with Singh’s conjecture that the entire story could be a made up ploy to profit off other’s greed. If this scenario were the case, the anonymous author would be humored to learn that in the 21st century, there are still individuals attempting to break the Beale Ciphers.

If professional cryptanalysts have been unable to decipher Beale’s message, what would cause the average Joe to believe he can? It’s not only the desire to find a gigantic sum of money, but also lust to be “first” or “special” or the best at something. One may be thinking If I decipher Beale’s code, I’ll be rich, AND everyone will know me as the smartest person ever! In addition, people often have a heightened sense of themselves, especially their personal skills. As a result, you get amateur and probably first time-codebreakers undertaking a task far beyond their abilities. It is important to realize when something is outside your limits. You can’t do calculus before knowing how to add, you can’t run a marathon without knowing how to walk, and you certainly can’t break an “unbreakable” cipher without extensive knowledge and practice with the subject.

The Great Cipher: An Unbreakable Cipher for 2 Centuries

By Junhao

On September 19, 2017

In Student Posts

The father-and-son team of Antoine and Bonaventure Rossignol invented the Great Cipher for the French king Louis XIV to encrypt the empire’s most secret messages, protecting details of his plans, plots and political schemings. While the nature of the Great Cipher was simply an enhanced monoalphabetic cipher with homophones, it seemed implausible that it remained unbreakable for two centuries. However, there were two main factors that led to such a secure cipher.

The most significant one was considered to be the Rossignol’s ingenuity and resourcefulness. Including 587 different numbers, the Great Cipher was obviously not a straightforward substitution cipher. But when Étienne Bazeries, a distinguished cryptanalyst tried to crack it as a homophonic cipher, he failed. He then came up with the idea that each number might represent a digraph, or a pair of letters. Although his efforts to this deciphering approach again yielded nothing, it enlightened him on the possibility that some numbers corresponded to syllables. After a few attempts, he made a breakthrough, with the discovery of “les-en-ne-mi-s” represented by a cluster of numbers (124-22-125-46-345), and thus his idea eventually proved to be right. During that time when cryptography was mainly about encrypting plain alphabets with cipher alphabets, it was creative of the Rossignol to use syllables for the complexity of homophones. More importantly, they had also laid traps for codebreakers, adding numbers which deviously deleted previous numbers instead of representing any meaningful letters or syllables. All their creative encipherment contributed to the strength of its encryption, making it confusing and harder to decipher.

Additionally, after the death of both father and son, the Great Cipher fell into disuse and many details about it were lost; therefore, for those who wanted to break the codes had to start from scratch. Due to its difficulty, only the most prominent cryptanalysts were capable of deciphering it with consistent dedication and patience. As a result, it was no surprise that the Great Cipher was known as one of the strongest ciphers in the history of cryptography.

Persistence is the “key”

By patelhg1

On September 16, 2014

In Student Posts

New things can seem very challenging at first. For example, a question seems so much simpler when we already have an answer to it. However, the question without the answer can seem very daunting, making it seem too difficult to even attempt. This is very similar to how the pattern of ciphering worked. First there was the shift cipher. When people realized what it was, it was extremely simple to decipher. Then there was the substitution cipher. This took a while for people to decipher. Some gave up, but then the Arabs developed frequency analysis. Once people understood frequency analysis, it was relatively easy to break.

Then came the Vigenere cipher. People were baffled. They didn’t understand how to break it, so many gave up in the process. They understood the concept but did not understand how to cryptanalyze it. Because people did not have a known way of breaking into the cipher, they simply gave up. However, it took cunning and persistence from Babbage to finally crack it. Once the way to crack it became relatively well known, people could easily decipher Vigenere ciphers with a little bit of time.

The reason why people gave up so easily is not because they did not want to break it but because they did not know where to start. With a new cipher, the cryptographers have the advantage over the cryptanalysts. The cryptanalysts were so used to frequency analysis that when a new “unbreakable” cipher came out, they did not know how or where to tackle it from. This led to lots of confusion and most of them simply giving up rather than persistently experimenting with different techniques.

Cryptography

The History and Mathematics of Codes and Code Breaking

Tag: Unbreakable

Feeble Attempts

The Great Cipher: An Unbreakable Cipher for 2 Centuries

Persistence is the “key”

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