Cipher Mysteries

Like hourly buses on a wet winter morning, here's a pair of Chaocipher pages that arrived at my stop one after the other, both discussing how to break John Byrne's Exhibit 1, and both strongly recommended reading for those interested in the Chaocipher. First to arrive was Carl Scheffler's page on Exhibit 1 (but you might perhaps want to read ...

The Internet is a strange thing, a virtual photographer's jacket crammed with countless pockets of enthusiasts. For example, you beautiful cipher mysteries fans circulate within one bijou (but nicely-appointed) pocket, while the massed legions of Slashdot fans have a Tardis-style hyperzoom lens pocket all of their own. But... what would happen if these two worlds collided? A chance to find out came in December 2009, when ...

"The Chaocipher" is a devious cipher system invented in 1918 by John F. Byrne: allegedly, it was so complex that nobody could crack his challenge ciphertexts (even with the plaintext to refer to!), yet was so simple that its mechanism was claimed to comprise only two rotating disks small enough to fit in a cigar box, and could be operated by a ten-year-old (admittedly a ...

The Cipher Mysteries stats to date: 568 posts - 16 static pages - 100,155 visits - roughly 190,000 page loads - 1775 comments - 115 subscribers. Thank you all very much for your continued interest, support, comments (both appreciative and snarky), tweets, and off-line posts and notes (always interesting). Just so you know, most referrals continue to come from Google with only one Slashdot-style traffic ...

A highly surprising message just arrived here at Cipher Mysteries from our Chaocipher Clearing House chum Moshe Rubin:- Is your readership aware that NSA has placed the entire text [of Mary D'Imperio's "An Elegant Enigma"] on its site? I couldn’t find the link on your site so here it is! This is a great find, highly recommended for all Voynich ...

I'm getting a bit cheesed off with the Internet: every time I do a search for anything Cipher Mysteries-ish, it seems that half Google's hits are for ghastly sites listing "Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries" or "10 Most Bizarre Uncracked Codes". Still, perhaps I should be more grateful to the GooglePlex that I'm not getting "Top 10 Paris Hilton Modesty Tips" and ...

In 1918, John F. Byrne devised a novel cipher system ("The Chaocipher") that he claimed produces the "annihilation of order and design in written language" - an indecipherable cipher. Though "crude", Byrne's working model fitted inside a tiny box that had contained "fifty small Havana cigars". However, even though he apparently managed to get his invention looked at by all the great American cryptographers / ...