Cipher Mysteries

By now I'm sure you're all thoroughly sick of the way I heap superlatives and laurel wreaths onto Tony Gaffney's hair-bestrewn head every time he cracks yet another of Bellaso's ciphers... and now he's broken two more, lifting his tally for the 1564 set of challenge ciphers to 6 out of 7. Though Tony dearly wants to make it 7/7, Bellaso's remaining ...

That man Tony Gaffney has been at it again, shooting yet another cryptographic tin can down off Giovan Battista Bellaso's fence: this time, it was Bellaso's 1564 challenge cipher #7's turn to fall. What was particularly sweet about #7 was that it was a completely different type of cipher to the others Tony had previously broken: rather than being some kind ...

Once upon a time (twenty years ago, back when I still had hair), I used to play for Hackney Chess Club in the London League: after most matches, the team would decamp to Brick Lane for a late night curry and a swift-ish couple of pints. Happy (if somewhat calorifically excessive) days. :-) And so it has recently been a thoroughly pleasant ...

In the 1564 printed edition of his cryptography manual, Giovan Battista Bellaso included seven challenge ciphers for his readers to break, along with a set of clues: these all remained unbroken and in obscurity until Augusto Buonafalce wrote about them in 1997, 1999, and 2006 in the journal Cryptologia. But that's all changed now! Tony Gaffney - who Cipher Mysteries regulars should remember from his ...

A huge thanks to the indefatigable Tony Gaffney who very kindly took the time recently to double-check my transcriptions (some of them derived from Augusto Buonafalce's transcriptions) of Bellaso's various challenge ciphers against the copies held in the British Library. Of the twelve corrections he suggested, roughly half were typos on my part, while the remainder were places where I had transcribed punctuation-like marks ...

After I recently mentioned Bellaso's set of seven challenge ciphers from 1564 on this blog, Augusto Buonafalce very kindly emailed me with scans of Bellaso's three challenge ciphers from 1555. I've now transcribed these (as best I can) and have added them to the existing Bellaso cipher transcriptions page. I do acknowledge that the font that my theme currently uses for ...

A little while back, I asked Augusto Buonafalce about Renaissance cryptographer Giovan Battista Bellaso's challenge ciphers, completely unaware that he seems to have published more articles on them than anyone else on the planet. (Shame on me for not subscribing to Cryptologia, I really ought to.) In fact, Bellaso published two sets of challenge ciphers in his cryptography manuals: a set ...

...or, in all its prolixitous glory, "The Six Unsolved Ciphers: Inside the Mysterious Codes That Have Confounded the World's Greatest Cryptographers", by Richard Belfield (2007). It was previously published by Orion in the UK as "Can You Crack the Enigma Code?" in 2006. You'd have thought I'd be delighted by this offering: after all, it covers the Voynich Manuscript, the Beale Papers, ...