26/06/2026

Issues with Recent "Solution" of Zodiac Z13

Of the Zodiac ciphers, Z13 (thirteen characters long) is considered too short for cryptanalysis. Late last year, however, Alex Baber not only came up with a solution but got endorsement from three ex-NSA officers. I read the experts' analysis, "Zodiac Z13 Decryption" (somehow, this page ends in an out-of-memory error on my PC), and liked their fairness in admitting the proposed reading may be "one of many possible solutions" and there may be many other possibilities for the substitution/permutation keys. From such an attitude, it is hard to understand how they can say the solution is "compelling". They appear to have been convinced because they found the proposed transposition can be derived by using a relevant name as a key. But such a key may also be one of many possibilities, as pointed out in David Oranchak's recent video.

Now I uploaded an article to discuss issues with the solution for Japanese readers, "ゾディアックZ13の「解読」は本物か".


 

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