During the French Revolution, Queen of France Marie-Antoinette sent a number of encrypted letters to Swedish diplomat Axel von Fersen. Two French scientists took a close look at them.
The pigpen cipher (also known as Freemason’s cipher) is the most popular secret writing alphabet. As reported recently, it has been used to encrypt gravestone inscriptions, treasure maps, certificates, mug inscriptions, beer labels and more. Today, I’m going to introduce ten more uses.
Blog reader Rosemarie Kohles from Coburg owns an old postcard written in a shorthand. Can somebody decrypt it for her?
The longest key ever publicly broken by exhaustive key search was 64 bits long. If you solve the cryptogram I introduce in this blog post, you can set a new record.
A recent article in the Sherlock Holmes fan magazine “The Baker Street Chronicle” reports on the relationship between the world’s greatest private detective and cryptology. In addition, it covers a few unsolved cryptograms from a real Victorian investigator.
In World War 2 the Germans used more than a dozen different cipher machines. A few more were developped but not used in practice. This article gives an overview.
Traffic analysis is a powerful surveillance technique used by secret services and large IT companies. In an interview, Dutch IT expert Bart Wessel explains how traffic analysis works and why so little is publicly known about it.
The British mail authority has issued a set of six stamps devoted to crime writer Agatha Christie. The stamps are packed with steganographic messages. Can you find them?
A British censorship manual from WW2 gives an overview on message hiding techniques. Some of the examples given are messages hidden in letters from prisoners of war.
A researcher from Liechtenstein has asked me for help. She has encountered three partially encrypted letters from the early 19th century. Can a reader decrypt them?
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