For you puter experts then > Beale Ciphers - In 1885, a small pamphlet was published in Virginia containing a story and three encrypted messages. According to the pamphlet, around 1820 a man named Beale buried two wagons-full of treasure at a secret location in Bedford County, Virginia. He then left a small locked box with a local innkeeper, and left town, never to be seen again. The pamphlet went on to state that the innkeeper, after having not heard from Beale for many years, opened the box and discovered encrypted messages. Never able to read them, he eventually passed them along to a young friend shortly before the innkeepers death in 1863. According to the pamphlet, the friend spent the next 20 years trying to decrypt the messages, solving only one which detailed the tons of gold, silver and jewels that were buried, along with a general location. The still unsolved messages supposedly give exact directions, and a list of who the treasure belongs to. According to the story, the friend finally decided to walk away from the quest, and publish everything they knew about the situation in the (anonymous) pamphlet, which was supposedly published by another friend of the innkeeper. There have been many exhaustive searches for the treasure, and much effort spent on decoding the other messages, without (confirmed) success. There are many claimed solutions, usually bannered in combination with a book that someone is trying to sell, but no one has ever been able to produce a duplicatable decryption method. There have also been some pretty compelling arguments that the entire original story was a hoax. There are several inconsistencies in the pamphlets text, and even speculation that the story was a parable related to Masonic rituals. More information can be found here. Voynich Manuscript - At least 600 years old, this is a 232-page illuminated manuscript entirely written in a secret script. It is filled with copious drawings of unidentified plants, herbal recipes of some sort, astrological diagrams, and many small human figures in strange plumbing-like contraptions. Carbon-dated to the early 1400s, it was brought to modern attention in 1912 when it was purchased by Wilfrid Voynich from the collections at the Villa Mondragone, near Rome. Color images of all of the pages can be seen at archive.org and Yales Beinecke Library website (the current owner of the manuscript). The script is unlike anything else in existence, but is written in a confident style, seemingly by someone who was very comfortable with it. In 2004 there were some compelling arguments which described a technique that would seemingly prove that the manuscript was a hoax, but to date, none of the described techniques have been able to replicate a single section of the Manuscript, so speculations continue. Attempts at identifying the plants can be seen here, and more information about the Manuscript can be found at voynich.net, voynich.nu, and crystalinks. New! To celebrate the centenary of Wilfrid Voynich finding the manuscript, a conference was held at the Villa Mondragone near Rome on May 11, 2012. For more information, check here. Zodiac Killer ciphers - From 1966 to 1974, the Zodiac serial killer sent more than 20 written communications to police officials. Most of these messages have been cracked, but there are still some that remain unsolved. The killer was never caught. Kryptos - In 1990, a sculpture was installed at CIA Headquarters in Langley Virginia, as a challenge to the employees at the Agency. Its thousands of characters contain encrypted messages, of which three have been solved, but there is still a fourth section at the bottom consisting of 97 or 98 characters which remains uncracked. The sculpture was created and encoded by Washington DC sculptor Jim Sanborn, using encryption systems designed by the Chairman of the CIAs Cryptographic Center, Ed Scheidt. More information: Kryptos FAQ Dorabella Cipher - In 1897, the well-known composer Edward Elgar (of Pomp and Circumstance fame) sent an encrypted message to a 23-year-old friend, Miss Dora Penny. To this day, it still has not been solved. DAgapeyeff - Alexander dAgapeyeff wrote an elementary book on cryptography in 1939, entitled Codes and Ciphers. In the first edition, he included a challenge cipher. Nobodys solved it, and he embarrassedly admitted later that he no longer knew how hed encrypted it. It was left out of the second and later editions. Some think it was botched, and many think it could still be solved despite that. It has lots of phenomena noted, but nothing close to a crack. Linear A - In 1900, a large number of clay tablets dating back to 1800 BC were discovered in Crete. The tablets appear to use two different types of scripts, which were named Linear A and Linear B. Linear B was finally deciphered in the 1950s. Linear A remains unsolved. The Phaistos Disk - A circular clay tablet about six inches across, discovered in Crete in the early 1900s, and believed to date back to 1800 BC. With an alphabet of 45 different symbols, 241 signs are stamped into both sides in spiral patterns. There has been much speculation about its meaning, with wildly variant claimed solutions so far. Its also been suggested that the disk might turn out to be a Rosetta Stone to help decipher Linear A, since it was discovered near a fragment of a Linear A tablet. More information here. Chinese Gold Bar ciphers - In 1933, seven gold bars were allegedly issued to a General Wang in Shanghai, China. These gold bars appear to represent metal certificates related to a bank deposit with a U.S. Bank. The gold bars themselves have pictures, Chinese writing, some form of script writing, and cryptograms in latin letters. Indus Script - The Indus Valley civilization flourished around 2600 to 1800 BC on the Indian sub-continent, leaving behind thousands of objects inscribed with a pictographic script that seems to have been composed of about 400 signs. A great deal of work has been done on analyzing the messages that are available, but to this date the script still has not been deciphered. RSA Challenges - There have been a number of modern computer-based challenges, including several factoring challenges from RSA Labs with implications for the strength of public-key systems, and some equivalently difficult elliptic curve challenges, also relating to public-key cracking (check here for Bruce Schneiers high-math analysis of the RSA/Elliptic Curve debate). The elliptic challenge ran from 1997 to 2009. The RSA Challenge with prize money was discontinued in 2007, though several numbers remain unfactored, and distributed.net has announced that they are continuing to privately sponsor the prize. Some snake-oil crypto companies also put out challenges that are arguably famous because the media sometimes pick up the challenge uncritically, but they are usually not worth mentioning on this list. Richard Feynmans Challenge Ciphers - In 1987, someone posted a message to an internet cryptology list, saying that Caltech Physics Professor Richard Feynman was given three samples of code by a fellow scientist at Los Alamos. Only one of the three was ever solved.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 03:47:56 +0000