3 ms·
> To this day the first and third Beale ciphers have never been cracked. Yet in the very same article it says: > attempting to use the Declaration of Indepen
by SeanLuke 3y ago
> To this day the first and third Beale ciphers have never been cracked.
Yet in the very same article it says:
> attempting to use the Declaration of Independence again on the first note yielded several sequences along the lines of ‘abfdefghiijklmmnohpp’.
Surely this is the plaintext itself, or something close to it.
- dmurray 3y agoIt would be feasible to construct a ciphertext that encodes two plaintexts, depending on which document is used to decrypt it. To cover all possible plaintexts, you'd need 576 word indexes, representing each pair of letters AA, AB, ..., ZZ. It might be hard to find a number i such that the i'th word of the Declaration of Independence begins with Z and the i'th word of the document you are using as the other key begins with Q, etc. But with some license to tweak both plaintexts, this seems within the capabilities of a motivated 19th century prankster. That said, I can't think of any legitimate reason to use this encoding, so it still points to a hoax or prank.
- cedilla 3y agoWould be a fun thing in a CTF or escape room. Use the first, obvious key to encode something like "correct method wrong key".
- andyjohnson0 3y ago> attempting to use the Declaration of Independence again on the first note yielded several sequences along the lines of ‘abfdefghiijklmmnohpp’. If the two un-decyphered noted use the same approach as the decrypted one, a couple of idle thoughts: I wonder if anyone has tried the same text but with positive/negative word index offsets? It would presumably be hard to extract a plaintext unless they are based on different texts that have a canonical form. Many books differ slightly between printinga due to errors and/or corrections.