Reconstruction of a Venetian Cipher (1552)

I succeeded in identifying the mapping between cipher symbols and plaintext elements in a letter of a Venetian ambassador (1552) in ASVe, "CX Cifra, chiavi e scontri di cifra constudi successivi", Busta 13 f.36-37 (DECODE R1845), which is now presented in "Venetian Ciphers with Superscripts". When I first posted the article in 2020, I couldn't do this and I simply presented the ciphertext and its decryption separately.

Once the deed is achieved, it doen's seem so difficult to think of identifying the first two symbols "rp5 m3" as "QUEST A", because "rp5" recurs close to the end and "m3" appears in multiple times. This time, I noted the succession of two symbols "p3 p3" and "K2 K2", which seemed to correspond to "ta ta" and "sa sa" in the decryption, respectively. (Later, it turned out that the transcription "sa sa" should be corrected to "ha ha", though the matching was right.) With these clues, symbols occurring more than once were identified one by one.

Sometimes, I had to abandon my identification. For example, at an early stage, I thought "pp0" occurring close to the beginning and the end was "in" ("Do-m-in-o" and "in Italiano"). It was only when the work got close to completion that I found this symbol was actually "no" ("Do-mi-no" and "in Italia-no").

As always, part of my trouble was that I could not read the decrypted plaintext. Repetition of the symbols allowed me to correct some part of my transcription. Below reproduces my initial transcription.

... rp⁵ m³ g⁶ e² d³ m³
r³ pp⁵ c⁴ mp⁵ lp¹ l² mp⁰ m² p³ p³★ pp¹ ep¹ n² pp⁰ fp⁰ g⁶ n⁶ c⁸ g⁷ e³
n⁴ xp¹ r⁶ np⁵ v² c² q³ cp⁵ e⁸ ap⁰ f⁶ c³ cp⁵ c⁸ c⁶ cp⁵
rp⁰ p⁴ k⁸ K² K²★ h⁵ c⁶ r³ dp¹ c² e⁸ n⁹ f⁶ p³ m³ np¹ c³ h² lp⁵
cp⁵ p⁴ r⁶ ap⁰ h⁴ mp⁵ b² N⁷ n⁸ d² a² a⁸ lp¹ x² d⁴ A⁶ p⁷ p³ l⁸
fp¹ ep¹ m⁴ n⁴ np¹ ♀⁷ h⁰ p⁰ a⁷ m⁴ m³ c² l⁴ pp⁵ t² m³ ap⁵ z⁷ cp⁵ rp⁰
l⁴ c⁷ d³ n⁴ a⁷ rp⁰ g⁴ n⁴ cp⁰ ♀⁰ m³ cp⁵ d² t² e⁸ ap¹ f⁶ tp¹ n⁶
K² np¹ c³ v⁹ c⁶ c² c⁹ np⁵ ep¹ a⁸ mp¹ ap⁰ c⁷ e⁴ b⁸
A¹ p⁴ g⁶ n⁸ m³ rp⁰ ap⁰ n³ c⁶ a⁸ v⁵ ap⁵ R¹ d⁴ m⁶ lp⁵ c²
l³ ap⁰ N⁷ g⁶ d⁶ k⁹ pp⁰ t² e² c⁷ m² rp⁵ lp¹ ep⁰ mp⁰ f⁴ c⁶

[decryption]
Questa cosa gia molti mesi e solicitata da Domino Nicolo Villario ilquale &ts mosta di esser fidel serviton della scr^ta v^a sa sanuto molta difficulta a consegnirt &ts de qui si suspicana, et egli teattasse tate negocio con intelligentia di lei icr i fauoz delle raggion del R-mo Patiarcha et finalmente lo sa consiguito di quel modo et uedera li scr^ta v^a della copia del decuto es so fatto teadus di Todisio in Italiano, er sara i queste alliguo Gry

The recontruction confirms that the same cipher was used in 1552, 1554 and 1556 (DECODE R1845, R1846, R1847).

"Deciphering Mary Stuart's lost letters from 1578-1584" is available as Open Access

I received a full-text request from someone for my coauthored paper, "Deciphering Mary Stuart's lost letters from 1578-1584" on ResearchGate. To my dismay, ResearchGate does not allow me to send it but does not provide means to communicate it to the requesting person. I hope he will notice this post.

The requested paper is open access and can be freely downloaded at
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2022.2160677

The pdf is 14.8 MB but the maximum file size allowed on ResearchGate is 3.7 MB. I looked for means to just sending an email with a link to the requesting person but there seems to be no such way. I have to say I'm not accustomed in navigating on this platform and it may be that I miss something.

I hope he will notice this post, or at least think of googling the paper title to reach the right website.

Telegraph Operator Leaked Union Commander's Name in US Civil War?

Ciphers in newspapers clippings in the papers of mathematican Charles Babbage are presented in my new article "Charles Babbage's Clippings of Newspaper Ciphers". Only one among the twelve remains unsolved, in which only the name of a brigade commander appears to be in cipher:

THE COMING MAN. - The New York Tribune states that a telegram was recently despatched to the Federal army directing to whom the command of a brigade was to be intrusted, and that the operator at the telegraph station declared the person selected to be Amjyrdkowasejow Deabxpeop. [annotated "Times Tuesday 13 Jan 1863"]

Did the telegraph operator leak the name? Could it be so important information to be carried in a newspaper in London?

(Edit: After first uploading this, I added one unsolved ciphertext from Evening Standard, 12 February 1870, seemingly in a simple substitution cipher.)

Emperor Charles VI

I mentioned Emperor Charles VI's letter partly in cipher in "Habsburg Codes and Ciphers", based on materials presented by Jakub Mírka. Now machine translation allows me to more or less read his paper, Jakub Mírka (2012), "The early modern cipher correspondence in the noble family archives deposited in the State Regional Archives in Pilsen" (ResearchGate) (in Czech according to Google Translate).

The letters are from Emperor Charles VI to Leopold Viktorin von Windischagrätz in the Windischgrätz Family Archive in the State Regional Archives (SOA) in Pilsen (in the Czech Republic).

One was sent when Leopold Viktorin stayted in The Hague as an envoy.
3 February 1720 (DECODE R5020; original R5019; key R5017)

Interestingly, the Emperor informs the recipient that the new cipher would be supplied in this or the next despatch to be used exclusively with him, while the old one would be used with the court office.

Other letters belong to the period when Leopold Viktor served at the congress in Cambrai (VUB).
13 April 1720 (DECODE R5022; original R5021; key R5018)
24 July 1720 (DECODE R5023; key R5018)
11 April 1722 (DECODE R5024; key R5018)

Another undeciphered letter interesting to me mentioned by Mírka is one from Johann Wenzel, Count of Gallas (Wikipedia), imperial ambassador in London, to Prince Eugen of Savoy in 1711 during the War of the Spanish succession. He says this is supposedly important.

Emperor Maximilian II's Cipher Letters

I already described the work by Kopal and Waldispühl on cipher letters of Emperor Maximilian II (1575) in "Habsburg Codes and Ciphers". The letters concerned are summarised in Table 1 of their paper in HistoCrypt 2021, to which the following shows record numbers in the DECODE database. (I present this as my personal note because it takes time for me to type the DECODE database name.)

R1472: Johan Kochtitzky to Maximilian II, 15 November 1574 "Letter D"
R1473: Johan Kochtitzky to Maximilian II, 22 February 1575 "Letter E"
(and in a different cipher)
R1407: Maximilian II to ambassadors in Poland and Lithuania, 23 December 1575 "Letter C"
R1412: Maximilian II to ambassadors in Poland and Lithuania, 24 December 1575 "Letter B"
R1471: Maximilian II to Johan Kochtitzky, 5 July 1575 "Letter A"

My Profile

I updated my profile at Academia.edu by adding a note that my current job title is a patent engineer (Wikipedia), not astrophysicist. I never call myself an astrophysicist but I'm aware I'm often called as such in media.

A Substitution Cipher in Chinese for Kids

I got a Chinese translation of a children's book that I mentioned when I reported a Korean version in March. I have been interested to know how the substitution table for Japanese syllabary is rendered in Chinese.

The Chinese language is written with thousands of Chinese characters, so unlike European languages with twenty or so letters or Japanese with some fifty kana, a substitution cipher is not feasible.

The book is Yutaka Hara, Kaiketsu Zorori, vol.11 ("Kaiketsu Zorori and the Mysterious Aliens") (Japanese: かいけつゾロリのなぞのうちゅうじん, traditional Chinese: 怪傑佐羅力 神秘的外星人). As expected, the substitution cipher is not based on Chinese characters but relies on the pinyin transcription of the characters. For example, the character 怪 is transcribed as g-u-ai in pinyin and (graphic) symbols for "g", "u", and "ai" are used to encrypt this character.

 

Coded Letters of Admiral D'Estaing (1779) and Marshal Berthier (1812) Transcribed

I uploaded my transcription of the coded letter of Admiral D'Estaing (1779) in "Unsolved Historical Ciphers". The ciphertext may be a bit too short, but the code is not very large, with the highest number 597.
I also uploaded my transcription of the available page of a letter of Marshal Berthier to Napoleon (1812). The code size appears to be 1200 and it would be difficult to solve analytically with this specimen.

Correspondence between Charles Babbage and Historian Everett Green

It is well-known that mathematician Charles Babbage solved a cipher in a letter from Henrietta-Maria to Charles I, but it is less known that he received materials on the ciphers used by the royal couple from historian Everett Green. While it appears true that he achieved his solution independently, there is evidence that the summary of the ciphers in his papers was taken from Green's work.
I uploaded a new article about this: "Charles Babbage Inquires Historian Everett Green"

Solution of William Perwich's Transposition Cipher (2/2)

Regarding the unsolved transposition cipher of William Perwich posted at the TNA blog on 4 August and my blog on 19 September, Matthew Brown sent me his solution on 28 September (GMT).

He found the first line can be disregarded as null and only the first 21 letters in each row are significant, corresponding to the scheme for Gascoigne. He observes "... keeping whole columns of text in each row makes the cipher much weaker than Morland's original, as you can simply write out all the ciphertext rows as columns and then permute to make words. Not very secure!"

The deciphered text reads:
"the souldiers grumble much that the king is of late growne cool tewards them and gives them not the encouragment in their addresses as hee used. they complain hee is wholly given up to his mistresses who are no enemies to 97 nor peace & consequently dissuade the 60 96 pursuing the french manufactere what vigour knows that peace can onely advance his designs. I heard a great man say that the 61 sayd to his brother he wisht him not to oppose madams going for 40 becaus her journey was for the interest of his king somewher upon most do boast of a hall"
 

This is substantially the same as the result obtained by another team reported separately, with some difference close to the end. 

 

Solution of William Perwich's Transposition Cipher (1/2)

Regarding the unsolved transposition cipher of William Perwich posted at the TNA blog on 4 August and my blog on 19 September, Norbert Biermann made a breakthrough on 27 September (GMT). While the ciphertext rows have variable length, he suggested that "each line represents a single column of the grid" with a variable number of nulls added at the end. He observed that such use of nulls is consistent with the instructions to Southwell and to Gascoigne.
If the grid thus obtained by removing nulls beyond the 21st position on each row is correct, the remaining problem is likely to be an ordinary columnar transposition cipher.
When George Lasry applied his solver next day, he immediately came up with a promising preliminary result. While there were still some odd columns (in the deciphered text), Norbert proposed removing the first column and rearranging the remaining odd columns. George found supplying two missing letters in the ciphertext further improves the deciphered text. At this time, about 90-95% was solved. (Occasional transcription errors had to be corrected.) I also joined the discussion and we further discussed code numbers. Now we are fine tuning the final text. (The deciphered text reads: "the souldiers grumble much....")
While we were fine tuning, an email came in reporting an independent solution.

A Wish to End Hunger from Wartime Experience in a Crypto Unit of the Author of Anpanman

Anpanman is the hero of a popular Japanese picture book series for kids. Its creator, Takashi Yanase (1919-2013), served in a crypto unit in the Japanese Army during WWII. I uploaded a short article in Japanese about his wartime career.
I found this by googling because I recently learned in a TV serial inspired by the lives of Yanase and his wife that what seems to be a childish episode (like giving out anpan, a sweet bun filled with red bean paste) is actually rooted in his deep desire to end hunger in the world.
Yanase's crypto unit did not go through intense combat during the war but suffered greatly by starvation. Yanase once said he wanted to convey the message that "you can end hunger by sharing and you can live together even with people you don't like".
The reversal of values following Japan's defeat in 1945 had a profound impact on Yanase. He said, "The one value that never gets reversed is devotion and love.... If someone is dying of hunger before your eyes, you give them a piece of bread. That is the starting point of Anpanman."

(Photo taken by my son in 2023.)

Correspondence between Emperor Ferdinand III and Governor of the Spanish Netherlands (1634, 1635, 1640)

I updated "Unsolved Historical Ciphers" with information I mentioned in the last few posts and further added entries about Emperor Ferdinand III.

An Undeciphered Transposition Cipher of William Perwich, an English Agent in Paris (1670)

An undeciphered ciphertext in a letter from William Perwich to Lord Arlington, Paris, 9 April 1670 NS (TNA SP78/129, f.180) is presented in a blog post of The National Archives (TNA). (I thank Norbert Biermann for drawing my attention to this last month.) It appears to be a transposition cipher, given the letter frequencies as well as the occurrence of abbreviations such as ye(=the) or yt(=that).

My transcription of the ciphertext is here, which is slightly different from the version given on the TNA blog. I grouped some letters (e.g., "QR" on the first line and the second last line) but I'm not so sure of this. Actually, without such grouping, there are exactly 500 elements (excluding the last "likelyhood"), which is plausible in a transposition cipher, suggesting a transposition matrix of 25x20, 20x25, 10x50, etc.
Assuming columnar transposition (a Dutch example from 1675), I (manually) tried various matrix sizes (not limited to the factors of 500) and looked for matrix dimensions that might allow transposition of columns (or rows) to align Qs and Us, but it was not successful. (I assumed transcription of Q and U was correct.)

The TNA blog points out a possibility that this employs Samnuel Morland's scheme (see my article quoted therein) used by some English diplomats at the time. Indeed, Sir William Temple wrote in 1669 "Mr. Perwick wrote from France for a Tryal between us" about "Sir Samuel Mroland's Cypher".
Actually, the transposition scheme proposed by Samuel Morland is not limited to rectangular matrices, but can employ a triangle, a pentagon, a hexagon, or even more irregular patterns. But considering that "ruled papers" were supplied, I think use of non-rectangular matrices is not likely.
We may consider various patterns for inserting nulls by studying known examples.

The letter is calendared on p.82 of M. Beryl Curran (ed.) (1903), The Despatches of William Perwich, English Agent in Paris, 1669-1677 (Wikimedia Commons), which silently omits the paragraph in cipher. (The first paragraph of the letter belongs to another letter in the calendar from the same date addressed to Sir Joseph Williamson, with some difference in wording. Probably, the calendar omits such repetition to different recipients.)

Variable-length Numerical Code in Austrian Archives

Given a ciphertext in digits continuously written without a break, its deciphering requires breaking the stream of digits into individual code groups. Although various schemes to allow it have been known for Italian ciphers, I noticed more elaborate schemes are documented in the Austrian archives, which are described in my new article, "Variable-Length Numerical Code in Austrian Archives". Some undeciphered ciphertexts (probably of a more basic type) are also presented.

A French TV Documentary on the Codebreaking of Mary Stuart's Letters Premiered in Paris

The 2023 discovery of more than fifty ciphered letters by Mary Stuart (which I reported here) received worldwide media coverage. The story of Mary Stuart, with a particular focus on our codebreaking, has now been made into a French TV documentary, Marie Stuart, l'énigme des lettres codées. The program not only portrays the tragic queen's later life through high-quality reenactments and interviews with historians, but also highlights how her coded letters were deciphered, featuring interviews with the three of us, the authors of the original paper. (Yes, I appear in it!)

The program is scheduled to air on ARTE in France on 27 September (program guide). Ahead of the broadcast, the world premiere took place on 16 September at the BnF -- the French National Library where Mary's coded letters had been preserved for centuries without being recognized as such).

The trailer is available on YouTube.

Cipher of Imperial Ambassador Juan Perez (1527)

The cipher used in a letter from Juan Perez to Emperor Charles V turned out to be the same as the one used by his predecessor, Juan Manuel, of which I uploaded my reconstruction yesterday. Although I listed the letter in "Unsolved Historical Ciphers", it seems to be calendared in CSP Spain. (I will update relevant articles when my PC comes back from repair.) 

 

Correspondence of Imperial Ambassador Juan Manuel (1522)

I updated the article uploaded the other day to cover a cipher between Juan Manuel and Charles V under a new title "Correspondence in Cipher of Imperial Ambassadors Alonso Sanchez and Juan Manuel (1522)".
Although the 28 letters from Juan Manuel to the Emperor are labelled "Non-decrypted" in DECODE, I noticed the first page of decipherment is visible in all but two of these records. Decryption may be found in the archives for the remaining two (R9501 and R9515, of which at least the former is calendared in CSP).

Correspondence of Imperial Ambassador Alonzo Sanchez (1522)

I reconstructed a cipher used between Alonso Sanchez and Emperor Charles V and uploaded it in a new article "Correspondence in Cipher of Imperial Ambassador Alonso Sanchez (1522)". It is similar to known ciphers for other ambassadors at the time, in the tradition of the Spanish ciphers from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella.
This will allow reading many undeciphered letters, including the two in the DECODE database that I reported in May in "Unsolved Historical Ciphers". (For some of the letters marked "Non-decrypted" in DECODE, plaintext is avaiable. So it is advised to check before working.) For example, the beginning of one of the two I reported in May, R9509 (which is recorded more fully in R9596) can be read as:
- - - - - A [xix] de es-t-e escrevi a vuestra magestad a-z-i-en-do-l-e s-a-b-e-r lo que lo-s de esta r-e-publica me r-e-s-p-o-n-di-e-r-o-n a c-a-b-o z-e [s/t...?].

Can a Vigenere Cipher be Broken without Key Repetition?

I've been interested in whether a Vigenere cipher without key repetition can be solved. If the key is random, it is a one-time pad and is theoretically unbreakable. On the other hand, if the key is a natural language text, I heard such a cipher (called a running key cipher) can be solved. But how?
I uploaded a new article about this: "Solving Running Key Ciphers (Manually/Digitally)".