The Reddit discussion group /r/codes is a forum for cryptographic questions of all kinds. Occasionally, interesting unsolved cryptograms can be found there.

Imagine you step out your front door and you see the following encrypted text written on the floor:

Reddit-Croydon

Something like this recently happened to a woman from Croydon, a suburb of London. Apparently, this woman had a nephew who knew that there is a Reddit discussion group named /r/codes that deals with cipher questions. He took a picture of the ciphertext and published it there.

The encryption method obviously a variant of the popular Pigpen cipher. Usually, a skilled codebreaker has no trouble to solve a message like this. However, this case seems to be different. Three months after the photo was published on Reddit, still nobody has posted a solution. Can a reader of this blog do better and break this message?

Many other cryptograms have been posted in the r/codes group. Many of these are of the kind “I have encrypted this, can you break it?”. Others have been uploaded by desparate students who need help with some cryptography homework.

The following cryptogram appears to be an authentic cipher message, not a challenge:

Reddit-Old-Book

It is captioned with: “Can anyone decode this message I found in an old book? It looks like morse code but I am struggling with it.” Indeed, this cryptogram doesn’t look especially difficult to decipher, but still nobobdy has posted a solution.

Here’s another Pigpen cryptogram from Reddit:

Reddit-Bookmark

It was posted three months ago. The solution is still unknown.

Can a reader solve any of these cipher mysteries?


Further reading: A German spy message from World War 2

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Kommentare (1)

  1. #1 David Wilson
    16. Dezember 2017

    The one in Croydon didn’t get decrypted? I thought once people figured out whether the first symbol was artistic or not, the rest fell into place.