Posted on 02/04/2018 1:16:14 PM PST by SunkenCiv
A 500-year-old secret code used in letters between one of Spain's most famous monarchs and a military commander has been cracked.
Ferdinand of Aragon's letters have tantalised historians for centuries.
Constructed using more than 200 special characters, they were deciphered by the country's intelligence agency.
He was behind the final recapture - Reconquista - of Spain from the Moors in 1492 and Columbus's journeys to the Americas.
The letters between Ferdinand and Gonzalo de Córdoba include instructions on strategy during military campaigns in Italy in the early 16th Century. They were written using secret code in case they fell into enemy hands.
The letters are on display at Spain's Army Museum in Toledo and it took intelligence services almost half a year to decipher four of them, some of which went on for over 20 pages.
The code-cracking has been described by some as a "Rosetta Stone" moment, amid hopes that it could lead to more coded letters being deciphered.
Details outlined in the letters range from instructions on troop deployments to admonishing the commander for not consulting the king before launching diplomatic initiatives...
The mysterious coding system used by Ferdinand of Aragon and Gonzalo de Córdoba was highly complex. It was constructed using 88 different symbols and 237 combined letters.
For each letter there were between two and six figurative characters such as triangles or numbers.
To complicate matters even further, the symbols used in the letters were written without separating words and phrases...
Spain wrested control of Naples from France in 1504 and ruled it until 1647.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
I clicked and read that.
Caesars wheel was even simpler than the Spartan message rods.
You're right. A true OTP used as a cypher needs to be as near to truly random as you can make it. That pretty much eliminates using computers because computers are notoriously bad at generating actual randomness.
That said, if your adversary is not a nation-state or a professional cryptographer, you can do some really neat things with existing books and data of that sort to create messages that only the truly dedicated are going to be able to do anything with. If you're able to set things up ahead of time, and the information you're wanting to encrypt is fairly time-sensitive, (meaning that a year from now I don't care if anyone can decipher the message), using computers and modern cryptographic tools, you can set up some nifty stuff using deterministic processes as a basis for symmetric cypher keys. Then again, if you're serious about your crypto, you'll just create PGP keys and use that.
I am still, to this day, astounded that we don't routinely use cryptography based on public-key crypto in our day to day lives. It is not rocket science, and can easily be implemented on modern computer systems. Hell, my email program has have PGP/GPG integration built right in for years. Problem is, very few people are similarly up to speed.
Linear A is older, probably used as the basis for Linear B, but clearly in a different language, and alas, there’s no bilingual, and many think the number of surviving tablets makes it unlikely that it will be cracked. Of course, there have been translations, but they haven’t been accepted, a phenomenon analogous to trying to identify Jack the Ripper.
Yeah, if the dynasty hadn't run out of good DNA, a couple more generations of marriages would have brought most of the other half of the world they didn't rule under their control. Astounding.
another antique method was to shave the head of a trusted slave, write the entire message on the scalp, and wait until the hair grew back before sending them on their way.
Those were not time-critical messages, of course.
The International Spy Museum... I just tried to surf to their webpage, and as I waited for it to load, a car sped up, slowed down, sprayed the house with automatic weapons fire, then sped off! ;^)
Here’s the best known British spy network from Eliz II’s time:
The Cambridge Five
https://www.spymuseum.org/education-programs/news-books-briefings/background-briefings/the-cambridge-five/
I’ve read that the best tool of the code maker is guile.
I first learned what little I know about it in some kid’s book of my youth, you know the kind, there’s a small group of brainy kids who try to outsmart everyone around them, yet they’re often spending the middle chunk of each story being outsmarted by the bully kid, who turns out to be the only real genius (an unintended feature of the genre), who of course gets his in the end. From that book I learned about frequency tables used to break ciphers (which are simple letter substitution systems) and how to build cipher wheels and such. What fun. ;^) ETAON...
My pleasure!
One of my ancestors! No wonder I’m so clever! LOL!
‘Face
“Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home for Emma.”
Sherdlu
"The ships are lost. Mindarus is dead. The men are starving. We don't know what to do."
Yup it’s in your genetic code — hey!
But did you know? - the precipitation in Portugal pelts primarily on the plateau.
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