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> some degree of plausibility for a would-be cryptanalyst But that's a very ahistorical theory, isn't it? The manuscript was written hundreds of years before c
by nkoren 2y ago
> some degree of plausibility for a would-be cryptanalyst
But that's a very ahistorical theory, isn't it? The manuscript was written hundreds of years before cryptanalysts were invented. For its author to anticipate that would have required an impossible degree of foresight. Rather, whatever features give it cryptographically interesting properties must have been motivated by something other than a desire to confuse/intrigue cryptanalysts, with that just being a coincidental side-effect.
- throwaway48540 2y agoOf course not, there were scholars focused on analyzing and decrypting encrypted texts in Roman Empire and probably earlier.
- tptacek 2y agoMonoalphabetic ciphers are commonly referred to as "Caesar ciphers"... because Caesar used them. Presumably the concept of a coded message followed pretty rapidly after the invention of the written message.