17 ms·
The solution of the Zodiac killer’s 340-character cipher
- DSingularity 6y agoThis cipher is pure security-through obscurity and it held up well.
- obilgic 6y agoso It held up pretty well, because he made several mistakes along the way, which made much harder than It is to figure out.
- camjohnson26 6y agoWhat does “much harder than it is” mean, it took 51 years to decipher it, that’s how hard it was.
- thatwasunusual 6y ago...and still the killer is unknown. That's pretty good, IMO.
- the_af 6y agoWhat's the connection between the killer's identity still being unknown and the strength of this cipher? The killer lied: the plaintext doesn't contain personal information, or if it does, it's a riddle unrelated to the cipher.
- evolve2k 6y agoThe killer sent three cipers, my reading is that maybe 1-2 are now solved, they are not all solved yet. Are they?
- camjohnson26 6y agoThey sent more than 3, the first 3 were solved quickly, this was a 4th that was sent years later. I believe the only undeciphered message is the text at the end of the 3rd cipher: ebeorietemethhpiti https://www.zodiacciphers.com/chronicle-letter.html https://www.zodiacciphers.com/chronicle-letter.html
- evolve2k 6y agoMy error, article header mentioned 3 and then later said there was a forth.
- thatwasunusual 6y ago> What's the connection between the killer's identity still being unknown and the strength of this cipher? Maybe none. This person killed several people, and THAT is your biggest problem?
- nl 6y ago> This person killed several people, and THAT is your biggest problem? There's a discussion about how strong the cipher is, and: thatwasunusual> ...and still the killer is unknown. That's pretty good, IMO. Someone pointed out that measuring the strength of the cipher by the fact that the killer is unknown is a bad metric, and you seem to believe this as a defence of murder? They are merely pointing out there is no connection between the fact the killer is unknown and if the cipher was strong or weak.
- obilgic 6y agoHe made mistakes using his own cypher.
- kshacker 6y agoJust curious. If someone were to start today, with today's computing power and knowledge of computers, how long would it take? The answer to this can tell how easy it may be to create a similar problem today.
- elliekelly 6y agoMistakes? Or misdirection?
- tomcooks 6y agoI think the mistakes could have been intentional traps, to make code breaking more difficult and waste more resources. Once you solved it you can understand the message (good propaganda), but using misspelled words could throw off some attempts and generate "false negative" results when beginning to solve it, making detectives believe they are on the wrong tracks. Given he fooled everyone for 40+ years I find it hard to believe he would overlook details, especially when it's about his main publicity tool.
- saberdancer 6y agoIn his public (non encrypted) letters he has some spelling mistakes. swiches instead of switches, cid instead of kid, figgure instead of figure, cerous instead of curious There are more. Even if it was intentional, I am not sure that spelling mistakes would make 60s/70s decryption attempts any worse. They did not work by brute force and it's unlikely he predicted someone will use a supercomputer to crack his code decades later.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y agoThink one of the most interesting things I learned in encryption, was that a random xor sheet the same length as your plaintext is perfect encryption. That the problem only happens when you reuse that sheet. This doesn’t apply here specifically, but if you would have told me this previously I would have assumed it was securing through obscurity.
- shishy 6y agoone time pad! so impractical but so good
- afrodc_ 6y agoThere's an interesting episode of Darknet Diaries where a former analyst at the NSA talks about OTPs and how he created an automated system for field agents to encipher and decipher them who found them exhausting to do manually. Edit: Forgot the link https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/83/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/83/
- chowells 6y agoIt's worth expanding on that observation a bit. What makes encryption "perfect"? This is not obvious, so I'll just skip ahead to the conclusion: encryption is perfect when it's impossible to distinguish which candidate plaintext led to a specific ciphertext without knowing the entire key. It's easy to see that a one-time pad qualifies here. Even knowing all but one character of the plaintext doesn't give you any cryptographic way to determine what the last character is. The list of possible keys associating the known plaintext with the current ciphertext allows for every single character in the unknown position. This isn't a matter of computational power, it's an information-theoretic limit. You just don't have enough information (from the cryptography, anyway) to prefer any choice over another. You can apply a pigeonhole principle argument here and see that this requires the key to have the same size as the message. (Something along the lines of each key specifying a permutation between messages of the same length, and you need the key size to be big enough to specify every possible permutation for that message length.) That argument can then be used to demonstrate the information-theory quality of the encryption is related to the ratio between the lengths of the message and the key. When you look at modern cryptography, you can see that we're not depending on information-theoretic security at all. If you had all but one characters of the plaintext and all the ciphertext, it's quite likely there'd only be one key that matches the known permutation. We've gone in a different direction: computational security. It should require an implausible amount of computation to derive what the key is, even when you know matching plaintext and ciphertext. It's certainly more convenient than moving terabytes of key around, and computational limits are actually pretty compelling, as long as flaws aren't found in the construction. But it lacks the satisfaction of provably unbreakable.
- buescher 6y agoIt can be fiendishly difficult to break a completely unknown cypher, or one that has key elements withheld, even if it's quite trivial to break if the encryption algorithm is known.
- thatwasunusual 6y agoCan confirm. Did a ROT-13/15 (vowels vs consonants, if it matters) test on _smart_ collegues. Turns out they fear the worst and start top-down.
- nl 6y agoWere they experienced at breaking ciphers? Plenty of smart people don't jump straight to a solution when seeing a ROT13 ciphertext, whereas I think most people who are experienced would realize pretty quickly there seems to be a simple transformation going on.
- cm2187 6y agoOne of the first things I was taught in math class at university. If there are two potential solutions, one extremely unlikely but quick to verify, and one more likely but hard to verify, start by the very unlikely one!
- tasty_freeze 6y agoAre you saying you did ROT-13 on vowels and ROT-15 on consonants? If so, that isn't a conformal mapping so how do you reverse it?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoObscurity can be a valid layer in a multilayered defense.
- diarrhea 6y agoMy defenses are multiple layers of obscurity.
- WantonQuantum 6y agoGiven your username, I suspect your method of obscurity is very good at putting people off the scent.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jgalt212 6y agonever roll your own crypto, but sometimes maybe ....?
- smegger001 6y agonever roll your own crypto is the type of advise the lead to heartbleed being so bad. it leads to a monoculture where one bug in the implimentaion makes everyone vulnerable.
- DSingularity 6y agoYeah. I think it is better to say “never roll your own crypto if your adversaries have infinite budgets and/or you have a lot to lose. Otherwise, knock yourself out!”
- digikata 6y agoWouldn't one of the "obscurity" features in this case be how few messages were encrypted with the cipher? If there were a larger database of encrypted messages, it may have been more susceptible.
- DSingularity 6y agoI think so. These types of ciphers are definitely vulnerable to analysis across messages especially if you can make a guess about something common to both messages (eg - common ending like “sincerely”).
- cwwc 6y ago“Security-through obscurity” ——— that’s my quote of the week.
- SamBam 6y agoI don't think that's the usual meaning of security through obscurity, unless I'm misunderstanding you. It's sounds like you're saying that something like a substitution cypher, or even a one-time pad, would be security by obscurity, because they key is "obscure." My understanding is rather that security by obscurity means you're relying on the attacker not to have knowledge about you system -- e.g. that you have an admin backdoor at /s3cr3t-admin-pag3.html (real-world example), or that you can ping the server at an unpublished end point to get a token. The opposite of security by obscurity is when the entire structure of your system is a complete open book (e.g. everything is completely open sourced) except the password, and yet the system is sound enough to resist an attack. But note that possessing a "secret" (a password, a key, a one-time pad, the substitution rules, etc) doesn't mean it's now security by obscurity.
- DSingularity 6y agoI see your point! I think you are totally right here. I think I fell for the trap of undermining the cipher just because it’s not based on modern crypto like prime factorization even though I was trying to praise it!
- NetOpWibby 6y agoWhat a creepy mystery, glad it’s cracked though.
- edem 6y agoWe still don't know who was the killer.
- clivecusslerad 6y agoWaiting for the Netflix documentary...
- partiallypro 6y agoThere are already so many documentaries on Zodiac. It's probably my favorite case because of the ciphers and letters. Unfortunately I'm not sure we'll ever catch him. I personally believe it was likely Arthur Leigh Allen, but it's also possible that he was just a fanboy and loved the attention of people thinking he was The Zodiac.
- NetOpWibby 6y agoOh right. Well...we have one asset figured out.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ChicagoDave 6y agoThis is awesome. Now I'd like to see someone recreate the original hand-written mechanism the killer used to create the cypher.
- barbegal 6y agoIt's pretty simple really. First you need to write out your plaintext and count the frequency of each of the letters in the plaintext. Now choose a set of 40+ symbols to do the homophonic substitution. You randomly assign these to the letters A-Z making sure you assign more to the letters that you use the most in your plaintext (probably e and t having the most) Now decide on an arrangement of the plaintext (transposition cipher), this may involve writing diagonally or spirally or in any pattern that can be conveyed as a key and is easy to write out. Finally, substitute the symbols, where you have a choice of more than one symbol pick one randomly. This should be done randomly rather than methodically to make the cipher the toughest to decrypt, you could use dice to do this. The decryption key that you pass to anyone wanting to decrypt the ciphertext is the set of symbol substitutions and the way that you have transposed the symbols. (E.g. spiral going clockwise from top right)
- akyu 6y agoI've seen speculation that his method may have been as simple as the ancient Spartan Scytale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scytale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scytale).
- liquidify 6y agoAmazing. It seems possible that the killer would have required a fairly advanced education to create a cypher with this complexity. Not too many self taught encryption creators exist out there.
- barbegal 6y agoThe cipher only uses two fairly simple techniques: transposition and homophonic substitution. Both of these are covered in any elementary book on codes and ciphers. Combining the two makes a cipher which is tough but not impossible to crack given a long enough ciphertext as demonstrated here.
- qw3rty01 6y agoNothing really sticks out in the cipher as being inherently complex or requiring advanced education, it's more of just a puzzle where you're meant to figure out arbitrary rules, which in this case weren't even consistent throughout the entire cipher (adding some artificial difficulty). It's pretty out of scope of encryption because it was meant to be broken.
- dtech 6y agoThis cipher isn't all that difficult, even compared to a simple modern cipher like DES. Ciphers are meant to withstand attacks if you know the rules (algorithm), this one doesn't, making it more of a puzzle than a cipher.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoRobert Graysmith (and others?) suggested the Zodiac killer may have been in the Navy.
- qw3rty01 6y agoA thread on the original solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25390941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25390941
- SloopJon 6y agoInteresting coincidence that the earlier submission has 340 points. I'm upvoting this submission for the link to AZdecrypt: https://www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=3198 https://www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=3198 Although it's a Windows executable, it looks like it's possible to build from the source in this repo: https://github.com/doranchak/azdecrypt https://github.com/doranchak/azdecrypt
- TonyTrapp 6y agoBuilding from source won't remove the dependencies on WinAPI though. You would have to port the GUI to something cross-platform at least.
- willio58 6y agoSo there are still spelling errors in the result, is this just due to the zodiac killer being bad at encryption initially?
- Jtsummers 6y agoSome of the spelling errors were common in his messages, especially “paradice”.
- bowmessage 6y ago"Paradice" was a well known misspelling of his, and actually aided in validating the solution based on others' accounts of breaking this code.
- dyingkneepad 6y agoThese days where kids have school-issued Chrome laptops and whatnot, the FBI would simply ask Google to grep for "paradice" in the records for every school district and within a few hours we'd have pretty good list of suspects.
- Voloskaya 6y agoOr you wouldn't because every kid using Google Doc would be using Smart Compose autocomplete feature and corrector making everyone's prose very homogeneous.
- mxcrossb 6y agoThis might be naive but, in the age before spell check, I wonder if a lot of people consistently made spelling mistakes like this. I mean you wouldn’t know you were wrong unless you checked in the dictionary.
- nerfhammer 6y agothere's speculation that he was spelling badly on purpose to make it harder to compare to his real-life writing style
- johnwheeler 6y agoThe zodiac should’ve used the plaintext of the first 3 messages as a one time pad key for the forth
- wyldfire 6y agoThe author's name is Blake, but AFAICT this has no relationship with the crypto hash algo BLAKE/BLAKE2 (by Aumasson, Neves, Henzen, et al).
- wyldfire 6y agoI don't know quite why this comment drew some negative attention. I read 'Blake' and thought, "oh neat I wonder if this person also did a popular crypto hash that I've seen?" I looked it up and found out that in fact they didn't and it's not named after anyone AFAICT. So I meant this as purely informational for anyone else who might've thought the same thing. Sorry if it was an off-topic comment.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoAnd the top Hacker News submission right now is "Superior IQs are associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests"
- camjohnson26 6y agoThis news broke a few weeks ago and a few write ups were already published.
- camjohnson26 6y agoSo is the only unsolved zodiac cipher the text at the end of this? Speculation is that it could just be filler text. ebeorietemethhpiti https://www.zodiacciphers.com/chronicle-letter.html https://www.zodiacciphers.com/chronicle-letter.html
- galkk 6y agoI'm curious - if the same thing, with the same approach to encryption would be written in non-English language (Russian, for example, or Hungarian) - would it be ever be cracked? Seems like many tools/approaches used were english-specific, and unless some lucky guess/hit, they wouldn't be applicable to other languates.
- lastofthemojito 6y agoI think the English-speaking world kind of has a target on its back in terms of cybersecurity because everyone who can use a computer (a slight exaggeration) has some knowledge of English, but not everyone has knowledge of Farsi or Korean or Icelandic or whatever. So if just about any hacker comes across a vulnerability in your English-language system, they'll recognize it. Meanwhile, if I stumbled upon a link that gave me unauthorized access to a Hungarian-language system, I'd have no idea.
- dane-pgp 6y agoOne subjective opinion puts this cipher as one of "Six top unsolved codes and ciphers"[0]. The other five also have interesting stories behind them, but the one I'm most looking forward to seeing solved is the fifth on the list, namely the Voynich Manuscript. [0] https://mysteriouswritings.com/six-top-unsolved-codes-and-ciphers/ https://mysteriouswritings.com/six-top-unsolved-codes-and-ci...
- jamiek88 6y agoI went down that rabbit hole for years and I’m convinced voynich is a hoax and unsolvable. I’d love to be wrong though.
- Pxtl 6y agoMy favorite take on the voynich manuscript: https://xkcd.com/593/ https://xkcd.com/593/
- carnold84 6y agoCheck out this link, in German, but seems to be solved: https://www.rainer-hannig.com/app/download/15835537224/Voynich_Hebr%C3%A4isch_von_Rainer+Hannig_7_6_20.pdf?t=1591559575 https://www.rainer-hannig.com/app/download/15835537224/Voyni...
- dane-pgp 6y agoInteresting, thank you. I hadn't looked into Rainer Hannig's proposed solution before, but it seems there is a lot of scepticism out there from experts who doubt the "transliterated Hebrew" hypothesis. https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2020/07/26/moshe-rubin-rejects-rainer-hannigs-voynich-manuscript-solution/ https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2020/07/26/mo...
- dane-pgp 6y agoFrom the little research I've read about it, the statistical properties of the Voynich Manuscript seem to be much closer to human language than to a text produced by any method that an ancient hoaxer would likely have come up with, but also not quite similar enough to human language that we shouldn't be suspicious of it. Of course, for any statistical pattern that we might associate with human language, it is possible to design a random process which produces output with that pattern, but the more complex that algorithm is, the less likely it is that someone living 500 years ago would have come up with it, especially when a much simpler process would have been enough to trick their contemporaries. One interesting example of statistical oddity is the presence of "words" (or "vords") repeated three or four times. That doesn't seem like a very natural sequence to find in a genuine text (especially in an era when documents were slow and expensive to write out longhand), but nor is it something that such an elaborate hoaxer would choose to include either, if they were trying to convince people that the text had meaning. A perhaps related observation is the lack of crossings out or "mistakes" in the text. This might suggest that the person (or persons) writing the text didn't know or care what they were writing, or alternatively that they held the work in such high regard that they started with a fresh sheet whenever they made a mistake.
- GenerocUsername 6y agoWhy are the K's all V's when there are multiple K's but only 1 V... why not make the V's K's so that more chars match their intentions
- joshuamcginnis 6y agoI wonder if the author has considered taking a crack at passage 4 of the Kryptos cipher. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos
- elahieh 6y agoThere is a strong parallel between them - the solution to Z340 depended on the observation (independently by two people) that there was an unusually high number of repeated bigrams at width 19. For K4, there's an unusually high number of repeated bigrams at width 21 and that pattern is much stronger than with Z340. The problem is nobody has guessed the method for K4 (and the message is much shorter at 97 characters). With Z340 there was the important context of Z408 and the underlying method of homophonic substitution. With K4 if people get into it enough, they usually try the polyalphabetic substitution of K1 or K2, or combine that with transposition ideas, influenced by K3, try that for while, and give up. Nobody will know the method for sure until it's been solved. Another parallel: Z340 "rates at about a 7 or 8 out of 10 in difficulty to decipher" according to Oranchak. When Ed Scheidt, the designer of the Kryptos codes, was asked the same question about K4 he said "I would think like a nine, it's way up there".
- angled 6y agoI only came across K4 today but surely the decrypted text is a reference to Victoria, Goddess of Victory, or the Brandenburg Gate. Tear down this wall!
- Apocryphon 6y agoAmazing work, but I can't help but to think that despite all of the effort put into it, it was still cracked by a handful of individuals over the course of a few months using standard statistical/mathematical programming tools. Why haven't FBI analysts done the same already? Is it conceivable that it was already done, just simply never publicized for whatever unknown government reason? One imagines that solving this publicly unsolvable mystery is actually a standard initiation exercise for new recruits into the elite circles of NSA codebreakers.
- walrus01 6y ago> Why haven't FBI analysts done the same already? Because the FBI probably has few or no professional cryptographers. It's possible it could've been solved in a couple of days by the resources in-house at the NSA. To clarify, I mean they probably have few people who spend time working on the math of crypto. They have lots of people who obviously know how to apply forensic software tools written by others to seized equipment.
- Apocryphon 6y agoWhile I don't think these other agencies would have been as interested as pursuing a decades-old cold case as a law enforcement effort, I could imagine that other orgs with codebreakers might try it as a side project or even a recreational diversion, much like trying to decrypt the Kryptos sculpture. Individual analysts from the CIA, DIA, NIST, even foreign ones like the GCHQ, DGSE, Unit 8200, etc. could have tried to decipher the messages, in addition to the FBI. Surely they have the capacity to break this code, if they were inclined to spend some extra time on it. It's not as if these agencies don't recruit from people who already love solving puzzles in their free time.
- exdsq 6y agoGCHQ have published two puzzle books in the UK and one of them definitely referred to the Zodiac Ciphers, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was a hobby project of a few of them. I do strongly believe if someone had previously solved it they'd have released it though -- there's nothing damaging in these texts.
- Covzire 6y agoWhat if the Zodiac Killer's plan all along wasn't to give the cops a chance at finding his name but simply give them false hope? The FBI budget isn't unlimited and making them waste time breaking difficult ciphers, along with some early successes to keep the hope alive might make them overconfident in expending resources in cracking the ciphers instead of good old fashioned police work. Then again...
- badpenny 6y agoI think that was, at least partly, his intent. He even stated in the letter accompanying his first cipher that it would contain his identity, then when it was deciphered it said "I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOW DOWN OR STOP MY COLLECTING OF SLAV(E)S FOR MY AFTER LIFE".
- person_of_color 6y agoWe shouldn’t support the killer by indulging in his psychotic delusions of grandeur. I believe this work is immoral.
- Clewza313 6y agoOne of the Zodiac's letters contains a short 13-character cypher that he claims is his name: https://zodiackiller.com/MyNameIsLetter.html https://zodiackiller.com/MyNameIsLetter.html Given what we know of his methods, you'd think it would be possible to brute force this by now?
- Edman274 6y agoThat's half the unicity distance of English for even very simple monoalphabetic substitution ciphers. It's probably impossible even in theory to decode that using any amount of computing power.
- miniwark 6y agoAccording to Fayçal Ziraoui, the transcription would be "KAYR". http://www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=5216 http://www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=5216
- amznbyebyebye 6y agoSome questions 1/how do we know we found the solution and not a decryption that gives a plausible message/solution. Aka how do we know this isn’t a false positive solution 2/have cryptologists studied possibility of “synthetic” cypher generation to bootstrap examples upon which an ML model could be trained to decrypt such message in the future ?
- kadoban 6y ago1/ I think the "key" doesn't have enough entropy to encode the text generated. This should be good evidence towards it not being a false solution. If your key can't realistically encode enough information to "pick" out an arbitrary false plaintext, and yet the plaintext you have seems genuine judging by content, then you probably have a real decryption. Also the way the cipher was done is plausible to the time period (that is, it's something you can do with pencil and paper), and the steps seem like something a human would do.
- jonthepirate 6y agoI believe there might be a hidden message in the decrypted text itself. The reason I think this is that there seem to be filler words added to otherwise ordinary language. Example "I hope you are having fun in trying to catch me". Nobody would use the word "in" at that location in the sentence. If you ask me, something slightly more advanced still remains to be uncovered. (prior to Dave solving this, I was also taking a crack at trying to solve this puzzle https://twitter.com/BlockJon/status/1292555925564395521 https://twitter.com/BlockJon/status/1292555925564395521)
- halfnormalform 6y agoNo native English speaker would use “in” but that construction isn’t unheard of.
- ehnto 6y agoAs another commentor pointed out, it can be found in the Queens English/Oxford English. I use and hear it occasionally still.
- shakna 6y ago> Nobody would use the word "in" at that location in the sentence. Except that was, once upon a time, a very common phrasing. As the writer was coming from the 60/70s, you need to adjust your expectations of English. "in trying to" is actually incredibly common for what might be called "Oxford English". You'll still find it in heavy use in newspapers. So rather than suggesting the speaker is making a deliberate mistake, or is not a native speaker, it might simply be suggesting a formal education - something that already matches the profile of the Zodiac killer.
- ehnto 6y agoI still use and hear phrasing like that, given I am Australian in a state where the Queens English held tight that makes sense to me.
- jokoon 6y agoI still suspect machine learning would be efficient enough at deciphering this kind of thing.
- Crazyontap 6y agoI really like New Zealand's policy(1) to not name the killers and not giving them any validation at all. While the puzzle has been solved and it turned out to be real mind bender, it may be the end result that that killer may have wanted all along. There is so much buzz around it (movie, subreddits, forums, and whatnot) that it really bums me out that we gave such a heinous criminal so much time and attention. (1) "He sought many things from his act of terror, but one was notoriety - that is why you will never hear me mention his name," Ms Ardern said in an emotional address at New Zealand's parliament.
- Shacklz 6y agoSo much this. I find it infuriating how after every mass shooting in the US, the US media (at least the few US papers I tend to follow/read) scramble to get out info about the shooter, with pictures, names and background-stories. Why give such a person a platform? I do realize that it generates clicks and people love to soak up that kind of stuff, but it feels terribly wrong on so many levels.
- mysterydip 6y ago> it generates clicks and people love to soak up that kind of stuff Unfortunately, you answered your own question. If a news outlet doesn't cover it, people will switch to one that does, affecting their bottom line.
- criddell 6y agoI watched CNN for about 20 minutes yesterday morning and they were talking about the shooting at the grocery store. To their credit, they only said his name once in that time. They referred to him only as "the shooter".
- yonaguska 6y agoLikely only bc he wasn't white. Atlanta shooter's photos were plastered everywhere.
- Morizero 6y agoDavid's reddit account, for those interested in seeing more from the source: https://www.reddit.com/user/doranchak https://www.reddit.com/user/doranchak
- justdumbo 6y agoif you crib for many words you can decode the message you are hoping for. That seems like the bias in machine learning. So you try to crib for words until the message seems appropriate for you, but maybe the decryption is not correct. People have an extraordinary capacity to connect words to make it sound like there is some real meaning. But the decrypted words were not naturally found by the algorithm but suggested by the authors. To test my hypothesis, about the lack of credibility of such a method of decrypting, I suggest to decode the same message thinking that the author of the plaintext is someone who got rich by a lottery prize. You may try millions crib like "I like millions", "I am rich" "I will win the lottery", and the like. And finally you will communicate to your audience only the few words that work for you to "decrypt" the message. I think the result will be something along the lines of: You finally won the big prize, the millions are yours, congratulations. What I am saying is trivially true for a very short plaintext, think of txyz and invent any work you like. So there must be a trade-off between the space of solutions and the message length, a signal to noise ratio. The solution propose 3 part of the z340, and each one add new capacity to the channel of solutions. Perhaps something like the VC dimension. caveat: I am not a cryptographer. Perhaps something like: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/22/4/438/htm https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/22/4/438/htm
- Crankler24 6y agoreally impressive the code kept uncracked for such a long time
- LoveMortuus 6y agoI'm sometimes scared of reading crazy people writing, because I fear that their arguments and points might make sense and end up breaking my mind...