Cipher Mysteries

The NSA's 2011 Cryptologic History Symposium (held in Johns Hopkins) ran yesterday and today, and had plenty of names long-suffering Cipher Mysteries readers will doubtless recognize in a flash:- * Dr. Jim Reeds, Institute for Defense Analyses: “Editing the ‘General Report on TUNNY’” * Dr. Benedek Lang, Budapest University of Technology and Economics: “Towards a Social History of Early Modern Cryptography” * ...

London, UK, 11 Nov 2010. In a surprising twist worthy of Voldemort himself, A-list children's author and philanthropist J.K.Rowling has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the popular Internet cipher mystery meme "The Voynich Manuscript". She now says it all was a 1990 publicity stunt for an early release of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", which was - much like Norwegian band's a-ha's 1985 hit single ...

I've had a few recent emails from historical code-breaker Tony Gaffney concerning the Voynich Manuscript, to say that he has been hard at work examining whether Voynichese might in fact be an example of an early Baconian biliteral cipher. This is a method Francis Bacon invented of hiding messages inside other messages, by (say) choosing between two typefaces on a letter-by-letter basis - that is, ...

It's a nice historical detective story, one kicked off by John Dee, Frances Yates' favourite Elizabethan 'magus' (though I personally suspect Dee's 'magic' was probably less 'magickal' than it might appear), when he claimed to have told an angel that his "great and long desyre hath byn to be hable to read those tables of Soyga". Dee lost ...