Little was known about the ciphers of the Unabomber, a highly intelligent serial killer, until the FBI published a detailed description last year. Here’s a summary.


Ted Kaczynski, also known as the “Unabomber”, is one of most notorious criminals in US history. Being a gifted mathematician trained at Harvard and Berkeley, Kaczynski renounced a promising scientific career and moved to a cabin in Montana, in 1971. Between 1978 and 1995, he engaged in a nationwide bombing campaign against people involved with modern technology, mailing or planting bombs, ultimately killing a total of three people and injuring 23 others.

Before Kaczynski’s identity was known, the FBI titled the perpetrator “UNABOM” (UNiversity & Airline BOMber), since his bombs often targeted universities and airlines, which resulted in the media calling him “Unabomber”. The search for this serial murderer was the most expensive manhunt in US history.

Unabomber

Kaczynski finally was caught after he had sent a lengthy treatise (“Unabomber Manifesto”) to The Washington Post and The New York Times. The two newspapers published the manifesto, which led to his sister-in-law and his brother recognizing his writing style and opinions. Kaczynski was arrested in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

 

Kaczynski’s encrypted journals

When FBI agents searched Kaczynski’s cabin after his arrest, they seized tens of thousands of hand-written pages. Among these journals were several that were encrypted using cipher systems of Kaczynski’s own design.

Of course, Kaczynski’s journals and his encryption methods raised interest in the crypto community. However, there was no official publication about them for almost two decades. Like in dozens of other criminal cases involving encryption, police was very reluctant in publishing information about the cipher systems. As it seems, some of Kaczynski’s cipher material somehow made it to the internet, but it is unclear what exactly was published by whom.

When UK crypto blogger Nick Pelling reported about the Unabomber cipher journal in 2013, the situation was quite confusing. I encountered the same problem when I carried out some research about the Unabomber ciphers myself. Here is an article about my search (in German), and here’s my (now outdated) summary in English.

 

Finally, an FBI publication

The speculations about Ted Kaczynski’s encryption activities finally came to an end, when in 2015 the FBI published an article titled “Kaczynski’s Ciphers” in the scientific magazine, Cryptologia. It was written by Jeanne Anderson, cryptanalyst in the Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU) of the FBI.

According to this article, Kaczynski used two distinct encryption systems (Code # I and Code # II). The FBI cryptanalyzed both of them based on instructions and keys found alongside the journals. It seems unlikely that FBI cryptanalysists had been successful without these aids. As Kaczynski did not intend to pass encrypted messages to somebody else, there was no need to share the keys or the rules of the system.

 

Kaczynski’s Code # I

The more complex cipher system, Code # I, is based on a nomenclator (a substitution table listing a number for each letter of the alphabet and for common words). This nomenclator is named “list of meanings”.

Unabomber-List-of-Meanings

In the first step, the encipherer encrypts the cleartext with this nomenclator. E.g. CRYPTO becomes 42 60 70 58 57. Now the following key table is needed:

Unabomber-message-auction

The encipherer extracts a number sequence from this table (this is step 2 of the method). The starting point and the direction are part of the key. E.g., if the starting point is the beginning of line 5 and the direction is from left to right, the number sequence is 27, 8, 8, 0, 35, 44, … In cryptography, such a sequence is named “key stream”. Step 2 may be referred to as key stream generation.

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Kommentare (12)

  1. #1 Klaus Schmeh
    4. September 2016

    Bart Wenmeckers via Facebook:

    Thanks for posting.Teds ciphers have also been used as test cases for some of the zodiac research as (I think) he was a poi at one point (still might be). Also his style and methods were unique.

  2. #2 PROMETHEUS
    housten
    4. September 2016

    deciphering the scam. R.C.Hoagland is an actor.
    we are watching you

  3. #3 Klaus Schmeh
    4. September 2016

    @PROMETHEUS:
    Could you please be a little more precise? What do you mean?

  4. #4 PROMETHEUS
    4. September 2016

    “Be smart – work hard – solve Problems” – Bill (of the) Gates

    WHO IS JOHN GALT?

  5. #5 tomtoo
    4. September 2016

    @klaus
    Mahl ehrlich da kann ich doch alles hineininterpretieren oder ?

  6. #6 Knox
    4. September 2016

    The general public has to pay a private organization $97 for thirty days access to a writeup about public records.

  7. #7 Klaus Schmeh
    5. September 2016

    Mark Romo via Facebook:

    Very interesting

  8. #8 idiot
    23. Oktober 2022

    you have no idea how it works because you didnt even decipher your own encryption

  9. #9 Wandee Thaweetham
    Chanthaburi - Thailand
    24. Oktober 2022

    @idiot

    Why don’t you enlighten us all if you have the answer?

  10. #10 Max Baertl
    24. Oktober 2022

    @Wandee Thaweetham

    don‘t feed the Troll

  11. #11 Wandee Thaweetham
    Chanthaburi - Thailand
    24. Oktober 2022

    Thanks Max, I appreciate your concern, but maybe he can make some contribution to the conversation and if it only provides the fact that he deserves his alias (idiot).

    What I found interesting about the article was that Kaczynski used two systems to create his ciphers. The first system are his journals, which became the Rosetta Stone for the FBI, and without it they would have been unable to decrypt his ciphers. Developing systems like that isn’t that difficult for someone without skills in cryptography, but it contradicts the statements Shannon and Kerckhoffs made and hence have no use as a communication tool between two or more parties. If Kaczynski would have shared his journals with someone else and planned a bank robbery, using his systems to develop a plan how to do it, by the time they would have finished their project and finally meet to go ahead, the bank would have already moved business online and in the building would be a fast food service or something else :).

  12. #12 David Oranchak
    http://zodiackillerciphers.com
    3. Februar 2023

    I finally made a video about the Unabomber’s codes:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aqx67s19mA

    It’s basically a weird variation of one time pad. But he put a lot of interesting patterns in the grid he was using for a pad. So I still wonder how secure it was.