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people have always needed to share secret information and found unusual ways to do so. An ancient Greek King, for example, had a message to another king tattooed on the shaved head of a slave. After the hair grew back, the slave journeyed to the second king who shaved the slave's head and read the message. But this certainly wasn't the fastest way to send secret messages. It would be quicker to send a coded message that could message that could only be read by intended recipient.
There are four examples of secret codes given- Transposition Ciphers, Block Ciphers, Substitution Ciphers and Book Ciphers. Among them, Book Ciphers is still the unsolved one.In the past,these secret codes that have fascinating histories of how they were written and cracked.
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Famous Unsolved Codes That Have Since Been Solved
Poe's Cryptographic Challenge - In 1839, Edgar Allan Poe published two cryptographic challenges which remained unsolved for over 150 years. The first one was finally solved in 1992, and the second one in October 2000
Cyrillic Projector Cipher - Washington DC sculptor Jim Sanborn, famous for the CIA's Kryptos sculpture, also created some related sculptures which included both the text from Kryptos, and some encrypted Russian text about KGB operations. The best example was the Cyrillic Projector, which was created in the early 1990s and then installed permanently at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte in 1997. It was cracked in September 2003 by an international team involving the Kryptos Group.
Oak Island Money Pit Cipher Stone (solved, though alleged treasure still unrecovered) - In 1795, a teenager discovered a deep pit on Oak Island in Nova Scotia, along with hints that there was a great treasure at the bottom. Over the next two hundred years, multiple well-financed attempts have been made to learn what is hidden, but have been repeatedly foiled due to the unstable nature of the surrounding land, and the tendency for deep tunnels to suddenly flood with water. Something is obviously there, because various tantalizing artifacts from 300 years ago have been obtained, such as a pair of scissors, an encrypted stone tablet, barriers of oak logs, and other man-made objects deep below the ground. In 1976, a camera lowered into a subterranean chamber allegedly recorded images of wooden chests, tools, and a body, before the unstable land again collapsed the exploration tunnel. And in 2002, a report was supposedly produced by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute with more recent information. In any case, along with large amounts of money which have been sunk into this quest, multiple lives have also been lost attempting to solve the mystery.
Smithy Code. In April 2006, as part of the trial ruling of a plagiarism trial about the book ''The Da Vinci Code'', the judge in the case, Justice Peter Smith embedded his own secret code in the 71-page trial ruling (pdf). Once the code was discovered by a London legal analyst, it sparked off a worldwide race to see who could crack the code first. According to The Guardian, it was solved by Dan Tench, the legal analyst who first discovered the code, after he received a series of email hints from the judge. For more information, check here for an explanation of the code by the Kryptos Group (who solved it, but were not the first to do so), and check here for The Smithy code page at Wikipedia.
If you know of a solution to one of the above codes or mysteries, or would like to suggest any changes or additions to this list, please contact the webmistress.
Poe's Cryptographic Challenge - In 1839, Edgar Allan Poe published two cryptographic challenges which remained unsolved for over 150 years. The first one was finally solved in 1992, and the second one in October 2000
Cyrillic Projector Cipher - Washington DC sculptor Jim Sanborn, famous for the CIA's Kryptos sculpture, also created some related sculptures which included both the text from Kryptos, and some encrypted Russian text about KGB operations. The best example was the Cyrillic Projector, which was created in the early 1990s and then installed permanently at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte in 1997. It was cracked in September 2003 by an international team involving the Kryptos Group.
Oak Island Money Pit Cipher Stone (solved, though alleged treasure still unrecovered) - In 1795, a teenager discovered a deep pit on Oak Island in Nova Scotia, along with hints that there was a great treasure at the bottom. Over the next two hundred years, multiple well-financed attempts have been made to learn what is hidden, but have been repeatedly foiled due to the unstable nature of the surrounding land, and the tendency for deep tunnels to suddenly flood with water. Something is obviously there, because various tantalizing artifacts from 300 years ago have been obtained, such as a pair of scissors, an encrypted stone tablet, barriers of oak logs, and other man-made objects deep below the ground. In 1976, a camera lowered into a subterranean chamber allegedly recorded images of wooden chests, tools, and a body, before the unstable land again collapsed the exploration tunnel. And in 2002, a report was supposedly produced by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute with more recent information. In any case, along with large amounts of money which have been sunk into this quest, multiple lives have also been lost attempting to solve the mystery.
Smithy Code. In April 2006, as part of the trial ruling of a plagiarism trial about the book ''The Da Vinci Code'', the judge in the case, Justice Peter Smith embedded his own secret code in the 71-page trial ruling (pdf). Once the code was discovered by a London legal analyst, it sparked off a worldwide race to see who could crack the code first. According to The Guardian, it was solved by Dan Tench, the legal analyst who first discovered the code, after he received a series of email hints from the judge. For more information, check here for an explanation of the code by the Kryptos Group (who solved it, but were not the first to do so), and check here for The Smithy code page at Wikipedia.
If you know of a solution to one of the above codes or mysteries, or would like to suggest any changes or additions to this list, please contact the webmistress.
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