The solution of the Zodiac killer’s 340-character cipher(blog.wolfram.com)
blog.wolfram.com
The solution of the Zodiac killer’s 340-character cipher
https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/03/24/the-solution-of-the-zodiac-killers-340-character-cipher/
169 comments
Without notoriety, it is unlikely the puzzle would be solved. Many cases are solved with tips following news reports. So reduced coverage could lead to reduced apprehension rates.
Alternatively, what benefit does reduced coverage offer? Do we know that less notoriety means fewer or less prolific serial killers? Maybe they would be even more prolific trying to get attention.
So if reduced coverage leads to reduced crime, then great. But if not, then denying them notoriety just hurts their feelings.
That’s great, but as it might lead to reduced apprehensions, I don’t think hurting their feelings is worth it.
Note: I don’t mean to belittle your point. I don’t like that society is so fascinated by crime either. But I think that is a separate issue.
Alternatively, what benefit does reduced coverage offer? Do we know that less notoriety means fewer or less prolific serial killers? Maybe they would be even more prolific trying to get attention.
So if reduced coverage leads to reduced crime, then great. But if not, then denying them notoriety just hurts their feelings.
That’s great, but as it might lead to reduced apprehensions, I don’t think hurting their feelings is worth it.
Note: I don’t mean to belittle your point. I don’t like that society is so fascinated by crime either. But I think that is a separate issue.
> Without notoriety, it is unlikely the puzzle would be solved.
I literally do not care one bit about this puzzle being solved. I do care, a lot, about people not getting shot when they go to the supermarket.
I literally do not care one bit about this puzzle being solved. I do care, a lot, about people not getting shot when they go to the supermarket.
Those two things aren’t connected. Also, many people do care about solving this puzzle, both for the sake of cryptography and for the chance it will provide closure to the case, if not justice, at this point.
We needn’t worry about the stimulating effect revisiting decades-old crimes of an entirely different nature, for scientific purposes, may have.
We needn’t worry about the stimulating effect revisiting decades-old crimes of an entirely different nature, for scientific purposes, may have.
The Zodiac puzzle was not involved in the shooting this week. It's ok to solve the puzzle.
Don't blame puzzle solvers for an old rotting and recurrent problem that the politicians could stop at any moment if they would really want it.
there is considerable research on mass shootings. Guaranteed notoreity is a stimulus.
The context here is key to why the OPs contribution is meaningless waffle.
There is a difference between a 50 year old cold case and a killing that happened last week.
In the case of a recent homicide with an actual arrest the "focus on the victims rather than the criminal" thing makes some sense.
In the case of the zodiac and other ancient cold cases it's rather irrelevant.
There is a difference between a 50 year old cold case and a killing that happened last week.
In the case of a recent homicide with an actual arrest the "focus on the victims rather than the criminal" thing makes some sense.
In the case of the zodiac and other ancient cold cases it's rather irrelevant.
So much this.
I find it infuriating how after every mass shooting in the US, the US media (at least the few US papers I tend to follow/read) scramble to get out info about the shooter, with pictures, names and background-stories. Why give such a person a platform? I do realize that it generates clicks and people love to soak up that kind of stuff, but it feels terribly wrong on so many levels.
I find it infuriating how after every mass shooting in the US, the US media (at least the few US papers I tend to follow/read) scramble to get out info about the shooter, with pictures, names and background-stories. Why give such a person a platform? I do realize that it generates clicks and people love to soak up that kind of stuff, but it feels terribly wrong on so many levels.
> it generates clicks and people love to soak up that kind of stuff
Unfortunately, you answered your own question. If a news outlet doesn't cover it, people will switch to one that does, affecting their bottom line.
Unfortunately, you answered your own question. If a news outlet doesn't cover it, people will switch to one that does, affecting their bottom line.
I watched CNN for about 20 minutes yesterday morning and they were talking about the shooting at the grocery store. To their credit, they only said his name once in that time. They referred to him only as "the shooter".
Likely only bc he wasn't white. Atlanta shooter's photos were plastered everywhere.
Maybe but I've seen plenty of mass shooter events where they were happy to mention a white shooters name regularly. I'm not sure mentioning a shooters name or not is inherently tied to race. How they describe it and such, I can believe that, but the name, not sure it is that specific.
That's my point? Unless there was a typo in your response? In this case, the shooter's name has a very distinct cultural connotation attached to it that would indicate non-whiteness.
I'm not even white, but it seems to me that there is a very concerted effort by the media in the United States to push a race angle on everything, with whiteness being specifically stigmatized.
I'm not even white, but it seems to me that there is a very concerted effort by the media in the United States to push a race angle on everything, with whiteness being specifically stigmatized.
Yeah I must have misunderstood.
> scramble to get out info about the shooter, with pictures, names and background-stories
They are looking for someone who says it was nice guy and how shocking it all was. Usually some neighbour whose "hello" was answered by "hi". If he is young, he was definitely bullied.
Then, few months later if you follow it, it turns out the killed was causing issues last multiple years, had history of domestic violence and abuse, restraining order against him, beaten up few people and his own friends actually say "he was rough around the edges". Oh yeah, and what was called bullying was actually kids in school avoiding him, cause he was insulting them, stealing their stuff and beating them.
They are looking for someone who says it was nice guy and how shocking it all was. Usually some neighbour whose "hello" was answered by "hi". If he is young, he was definitely bullied.
Then, few months later if you follow it, it turns out the killed was causing issues last multiple years, had history of domestic violence and abuse, restraining order against him, beaten up few people and his own friends actually say "he was rough around the edges". Oh yeah, and what was called bullying was actually kids in school avoiding him, cause he was insulting them, stealing their stuff and beating them.
> Why give such a person a platform?
It did lead to the Unabomber's arrest. But in that case of course the newspapers only published the manifesto at the request of the FBI.
It did lead to the Unabomber's arrest. But in that case of course the newspapers only published the manifesto at the request of the FBI.
I spent four years working in the only building that the Unabomber bombed twice (Cory Hall at the University of Califoria, Berkeley), when I was in grad school, though the bombings were in the 80s and I was there in the early 90s. But when I was there he had not yet been caught, so we didn't know he wouldn't strike again.
In that case, the killer's identity was unknown, but with so much text authored by him, the FBI figured (correctly) that someone would recognize the killer by his writing, and that outweighed the negatives of giving him more publicity; he already had plenty of that.
In that case, the killer's identity was unknown, but with so much text authored by him, the FBI figured (correctly) that someone would recognize the killer by his writing, and that outweighed the negatives of giving him more publicity; he already had plenty of that.
Here in Brazil we had an incident years ago about this. Forgive any inaccuracies, it's been a while.
A man was called in by his girlfriend to her house, who she broke up with. He then pulled out a gun and held her and her best friend hostage for days at gunpoint. Police was called in, of course, and they spent days trying to negotiate with him so he'd let them in.
Of course, this is all the media talked about while it happened. One show host specifically, called Sonia Abrão, somehow managed to call the guy ON LIVE TELEVISION and had the most casual conversation ever, trying to get him to turn himself in.
Some time later, he let her friend go and police decided to raid the place. Only the friend survived.
This resulted in a documentary called Quem Matou Eloá? (Who Killed Eloá?) where her family and feminist figures talk about how her death was more than just a jealous boyfriend, and the media had a significant part of the guilt.
A man was called in by his girlfriend to her house, who she broke up with. He then pulled out a gun and held her and her best friend hostage for days at gunpoint. Police was called in, of course, and they spent days trying to negotiate with him so he'd let them in.
Of course, this is all the media talked about while it happened. One show host specifically, called Sonia Abrão, somehow managed to call the guy ON LIVE TELEVISION and had the most casual conversation ever, trying to get him to turn himself in.
Some time later, he let her friend go and police decided to raid the place. Only the friend survived.
This resulted in a documentary called Quem Matou Eloá? (Who Killed Eloá?) where her family and feminist figures talk about how her death was more than just a jealous boyfriend, and the media had a significant part of the guilt.
> Why give such a person a platform?
Because people have a right to know, and I don't want big corporations to decide what kind of information to hide from me.
Because people have a right to know, and I don't want big corporations to decide what kind of information to hide from me.
I generally agree but in this case the damage was already done. The Zodiac sent three mails to local newspapers and the San Francisco Chronicle was the first to publish the cryptogram (all of them was eventually published though). The Zodiac continued to send most subsequent threats and cryptograms to the Chronicle expecting quick turnaround, and I feel the Chronicle essentially fed the Zodiac Killer in midst of its battle against the Examiner.
This is a good policy. I recently watched "The Investigation" (Efterforskningen), a Danish TV dramatisation of the investigation into the murder of Kim Wall in 2017. Something I realised after a while is that the accused is never named nor shown or heard in the show, at all.
There's no detail lost, it's an in-depth retelling, it has all the information you need to get an understanding of the case. It also doesn't feel forced – it took me a while to notice it.
I believe the show does justice to the victim without giving anything to the perpetrator, and it's refreshing.
There's no detail lost, it's an in-depth retelling, it has all the information you need to get an understanding of the case. It also doesn't feel forced – it took me a while to notice it.
I believe the show does justice to the victim without giving anything to the perpetrator, and it's refreshing.
"the show does justice to the victim" -- I'm not sure what that means, whether it can be meaningful. I imagine most victims would rather just be left alone, including the dead ones.
I can't imagine that the family of the victim would experience any "justice" from the mass consumption of their grief and pain for entertainment.
Fair point, maybe I took that too far.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I felt the show was as respectful to the victim as possible.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I felt the show was as respectful to the victim as possible.
I find your sentiment to be better rephrased as:
> I dislike the degree to which people are fascinated by serial killers/criminals in general
People seek this stuff out ravenously. Most of the supply of information, at least to me, appears to be driven by the demand for it. I've never been particularly interested in it, personally.
> I dislike the degree to which people are fascinated by serial killers/criminals in general
People seek this stuff out ravenously. Most of the supply of information, at least to me, appears to be driven by the demand for it. I've never been particularly interested in it, personally.
Abnormal psychology, including serial or mass killers, is fascinating. One can learn some things about how people work by studying these outliers.
Besides, there’s value in being occasionally reminded that some small fraction of people in your community are actually predators, even though 99% of the people you interact with are perfectly ordinary.
I think this is an admirable attitude, but damnatio memoriae didn't work for Herostratus. I think we should take more active measures (buybacks, additional licensing limitations, training/storage requirements, etc) in the USA to reduce the number of firearms.
I recall NPR in the US took some steps about covering stories like this based on what psychologists studying killers found from talking to them. They would try to minimize how often they mentioned things the killers wanted to hear in the news: The killer's name, limit describing the chaos of the event, avoid manifesto type discussions and just cover that aspect very generally.
Instead they'd focus on things that it seems like mass killers really don't like to hear about, the names of the victims, stories about the community and etc .... and in a lot of ways those actually seem like the more important things too.
Instead they'd focus on things that it seems like mass killers really don't like to hear about, the names of the victims, stories about the community and etc .... and in a lot of ways those actually seem like the more important things too.
Amazing work, but I can't help but to think that despite all of the effort put into it, it was still cracked by a handful of individuals over the course of a few months using standard statistical/mathematical programming tools.
Why haven't FBI analysts done the same already? Is it conceivable that it was already done, just simply never publicized for whatever unknown government reason? One imagines that solving this publicly unsolvable mystery is actually a standard initiation exercise for new recruits into the elite circles of NSA codebreakers.
Why haven't FBI analysts done the same already? Is it conceivable that it was already done, just simply never publicized for whatever unknown government reason? One imagines that solving this publicly unsolvable mystery is actually a standard initiation exercise for new recruits into the elite circles of NSA codebreakers.
Why haven't FBI analysts done the same already?
This is pretty easy. They are a law enforcement agency. The Zodiac killer was active over 40 years ago and is likely dead of old age. Solving this will not prevent a crime or further any of the FBI's other missions (https://www.fbi.gov/about/mission). It's a great feat, but the capability to do an analysis like this wasn't as generally available when it would have been useful, and now it's just a historical curiosity.
Congratulations to Dr. Blake.
This is pretty easy. They are a law enforcement agency. The Zodiac killer was active over 40 years ago and is likely dead of old age. Solving this will not prevent a crime or further any of the FBI's other missions (https://www.fbi.gov/about/mission). It's a great feat, but the capability to do an analysis like this wasn't as generally available when it would have been useful, and now it's just a historical curiosity.
Congratulations to Dr. Blake.
Normally, when you encrypt a message, you have a recipient in mind. When it's one government to another government, or one person to another person, it's safe to assume that the message is authentic and meaningful, and not just designed to waste time, and that a recipient has a way of decoding the message. Normally, the point of encrypting a message is that you want it to be unbreakable by anyone except the intended recipient, and that you're not wasting their time by sending gibberish once decoded.
In this case, it's a deranged serial killer that's sending a message to law enforcement. The sender is someone who kills people for personal gratification, so it's pretty safe to assume that someone who does that might also want to mess with people for the sake of personal gratification. Crucially, there is no intended recipient other than law enforcement, so there would be no reason to include any actual sensitive information because there's no one to send it to other than the FBI. There's no reason to believe that he'd write a message that would give himself up. Real life is not like the fable of Rumpelstiltskin where solving a riddle makes someone honor-bound to give themselves up. Continuing to solve these ciphers probably fed into power trips and sexual gratification for the author.
It is not surprising that an investigative agency did not allocate a ton of resources to decode a message that one could anticipate would say something like "are you having fun with my game yet?" without any other prior information.
In this case, it's a deranged serial killer that's sending a message to law enforcement. The sender is someone who kills people for personal gratification, so it's pretty safe to assume that someone who does that might also want to mess with people for the sake of personal gratification. Crucially, there is no intended recipient other than law enforcement, so there would be no reason to include any actual sensitive information because there's no one to send it to other than the FBI. There's no reason to believe that he'd write a message that would give himself up. Real life is not like the fable of Rumpelstiltskin where solving a riddle makes someone honor-bound to give themselves up. Continuing to solve these ciphers probably fed into power trips and sexual gratification for the author.
It is not surprising that an investigative agency did not allocate a ton of resources to decode a message that one could anticipate would say something like "are you having fun with my game yet?" without any other prior information.
Certainly, the FBI in the '60s and '70s would have been unlikely to be expanding much effort towards this situation. Though I think everyone here is assuming that intelligence agencies treat all of these public puzzles with the same degree of utmost seriousness.
Take the Taman Shud mystery- only one death, completely without context. Yet it's mentioned that military analysts took a shot at unravelling the mystery:
> In 1978, following a request from ABC-TV journalist Stuart Littlemore, Department of Defence cryptographers analysed the handwritten text. The cryptographers reported that it would be impossible to provide "a satisfactory answer": if the text were an encrypted message, its brevity meant that it had "insufficient symbols" from which a clear meaning could be extracted, and the text could be the "meaningless" product of a "disturbed mind".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case
I don't think spies are any less interested in perplexing mysteries than the rest of the public. While I don't expect that an agency would throw all of their manpower at a case such as this, I could imagine individual analysts taking a stab at it on their own time. Maybe the organizations themselves might sponsor side projects as a means to test codebreaking techniques and glean lessons along in the process. I mean, why else does the NSA have a page on the Voynich Manuscript:
https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/voy...
They even did an entire study on it:
https://archive.org/details/VoynichManuscriptAnElegantEnigma...
Serious agencies dive into less-than-serious studies into exotic or sensationalist topics all of the time. Sometimes for general interest, sometimes for good PR, sometimes simply because of bureaucratic waste. Why else do we hear about military studies of UFOs, from Project Blue Book to recent news stories? Given the enduring mystery of the Zodiac Killer, I can't imagine why some of these professionals- beyond the FBI even- might not have tried to crack it, themselves. And perhaps some have already succeeded.
Edit:
> There's no reason to believe that he'd write a message that would give himself up. Real life is not like the fable of Rumpelstiltskin where solving a riddle makes someone honor-bound to give themselves up.
Despite this, perhaps figuring out the message would've given some sort of psychological insight or contextual clues that could have helped investigators determine the identity of the killer.
Not to mention, your point is refuted retroactively by the case of the BTK Killer, whose taunting anonymous puzzles were his downfall. Though admittedly investigators identified him not by actually solving his puzzles, but by analyzing the medium they were conveyed in.
Take the Taman Shud mystery- only one death, completely without context. Yet it's mentioned that military analysts took a shot at unravelling the mystery:
> In 1978, following a request from ABC-TV journalist Stuart Littlemore, Department of Defence cryptographers analysed the handwritten text. The cryptographers reported that it would be impossible to provide "a satisfactory answer": if the text were an encrypted message, its brevity meant that it had "insufficient symbols" from which a clear meaning could be extracted, and the text could be the "meaningless" product of a "disturbed mind".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case
I don't think spies are any less interested in perplexing mysteries than the rest of the public. While I don't expect that an agency would throw all of their manpower at a case such as this, I could imagine individual analysts taking a stab at it on their own time. Maybe the organizations themselves might sponsor side projects as a means to test codebreaking techniques and glean lessons along in the process. I mean, why else does the NSA have a page on the Voynich Manuscript:
https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/voy...
They even did an entire study on it:
https://archive.org/details/VoynichManuscriptAnElegantEnigma...
Serious agencies dive into less-than-serious studies into exotic or sensationalist topics all of the time. Sometimes for general interest, sometimes for good PR, sometimes simply because of bureaucratic waste. Why else do we hear about military studies of UFOs, from Project Blue Book to recent news stories? Given the enduring mystery of the Zodiac Killer, I can't imagine why some of these professionals- beyond the FBI even- might not have tried to crack it, themselves. And perhaps some have already succeeded.
Edit:
> There's no reason to believe that he'd write a message that would give himself up. Real life is not like the fable of Rumpelstiltskin where solving a riddle makes someone honor-bound to give themselves up.
Despite this, perhaps figuring out the message would've given some sort of psychological insight or contextual clues that could have helped investigators determine the identity of the killer.
Not to mention, your point is refuted retroactively by the case of the BTK Killer, whose taunting anonymous puzzles were his downfall. Though admittedly investigators identified him not by actually solving his puzzles, but by analyzing the medium they were conveyed in.
Well a highschool teacher deciphered one of the letters soon after it was published... so the time wasting excuse doesn't work. As far as resources are concerned:
"July 12, 2016 Update: The FBI has redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case to focus on other investigative priorities."
-- https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/db-cooper-hijacking
Here is a much more simple explanation: the FBI is notoriously bad at anything involving encryption or novel dynamics. That is why the Secret Service was so heavily involved in the big hacker crackdown decades ago, because the FBI was totally lost in the sauce. Bank robbery, payrolling informants, and CP they've got down pat.
"July 12, 2016 Update: The FBI has redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case to focus on other investigative priorities."
-- https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/db-cooper-hijacking
Here is a much more simple explanation: the FBI is notoriously bad at anything involving encryption or novel dynamics. That is why the Secret Service was so heavily involved in the big hacker crackdown decades ago, because the FBI was totally lost in the sauce. Bank robbery, payrolling informants, and CP they've got down pat.
It was cracked by a handful of individuals PLUS the several hundred/thousand other individuals who tried and failed. It is more reasonably seen as the efforts of every qualified person who gave it serious effort.
The FBI is not going to automatically hire the people who will succeed at this vs. fail valiantly. To get the same results they would have to dedicate the same resources which would be huge.
The FBI is not going to automatically hire the people who will succeed at this vs. fail valiantly. To get the same results they would have to dedicate the same resources which would be huge.
You forgot this part, they used Spartan HPC.
"It consists of 72 nodes, each with four NVIDIA P100 graphics cards, which can provide a theoretical maximum of around 900 teraflops."
I don't know how much time and computational power they used, but it explains why the problem was not solved for a long time.
"It consists of 72 nodes, each with four NVIDIA P100 graphics cards, which can provide a theoretical maximum of around 900 teraflops."
I don't know how much time and computational power they used, but it explains why the problem was not solved for a long time.
I don't get the impression that several hundred/thousand individuals had anything to do with this being solved by this person, except perhaps by virtue of not solving it and thereby leaving it to be an open problem with the opportunity to be solved.
After reading the article, this didn't come across as a "standing on the shoulders of giants" situation, but rather that this person by chance had the problem, found it interesting enough to work on, and happened to try the right path to solve it.
After reading the article, this didn't come across as a "standing on the shoulders of giants" situation, but rather that this person by chance had the problem, found it interesting enough to work on, and happened to try the right path to solve it.
Right, but if the FBI goes and hires a code breaker, they don’t get one of the three who solved it. They get one of the thousands with the credentials to have a reasonable chance of success. So if the FBI wants to put the three who solved it on the job, they have to deploy the thousand who didn’t because they don’t know the difference between them until it’s solved.
How about the FBI builds a time machine, goes to the future to find out who solved it, then hires those people? I call it self-fulfilling cryptography.
Still survivorship bias. We tend to assume that because they cracked it, anyone like them could've done that in the past. In reality, maybe even the author had a chance of 0.001% to crack it and they just got lucky in choosing the right paths and having the right intuitions.
It's the same in many parts of research. You obviously would've had no chance without their expertise but just because a researcher discovers something new does not mean there's no luck involved.
It's the same in many parts of research. You obviously would've had no chance without their expertise but just because a researcher discovers something new does not mean there's no luck involved.
I think the point of the person to whom you're replying is that it being solved doesn't mean it was as easy as it now looks. When we see it done and we see the methods are not all that novel, we are biased to think that. But the fact that it was not more complete until then and was a subject of fascination for many actually implies the opposite. We're looking at an incredibly rare event and asking why a few specific investigators couldn't have achieved that decades ago.
The "decades ago" caveat is especially key, because they used a computer system with raw performance well within an order of magnitude of today's Top500 supercomputers. I like to point out government incompetence too, but spending that kind of resources banging away at a message from a killer we don't believe has been active for several decades isn't exactly a prudent move.
The "decades ago" caveat is especially key, because they used a computer system with raw performance well within an order of magnitude of today's Top500 supercomputers. I like to point out government incompetence too, but spending that kind of resources banging away at a message from a killer we don't believe has been active for several decades isn't exactly a prudent move.
Sure but each person seriously attempting it still increased the probability of a solution arising
Sure but still mutually exclusive from this specific attempt.
I wasn't saying that this was actual literally an interview problem for intelligence services. It was sort of a joke riffing off the possibility that this was already solved before, simply because it seems like it's within the technical capabilities of intelligence agencies (and academic research teams, perhaps) to crack this code. And the joke was that it wasn't even for gating purposes, but more like an introductory first homework assignment for the elite of elites.
I'm not diminishing the tremendous work done by these codebreakers, I'm just speculating if it was already achievable by institutions, just not revealed publicly.
I'm not diminishing the tremendous work done by these codebreakers, I'm just speculating if it was already achievable by institutions, just not revealed publicly.
In 1980s, they did not have the computing capacity, even if they had a burning desire.
Now that the capacity is easily available, I bet they have many more recent cases to which to devote a few months of dedicated work.
Now that the capacity is easily available, I bet they have many more recent cases to which to devote a few months of dedicated work.
Maybe even intelligence analysts like cracking puzzles in their spare time. Takes a longer timeframe than a few months, but this mystery has been around for a long time already.
Like I said down thread, there's analysts who pursue the solving of the Kryptos sculpture. Why not this puzzle?
> [T]he CIA revealed that their analyst David Stein had solved the same passages in 1998 using pencil and paper techniques, although at the time of his solution the information was only disseminated within the intelligence community.[9] No public announcement was made until July 1999,[10][11] although in November 1998 it was revealed that "a CIA analyst working on his own time [had] solved the lion's share of it".[12]
Like I said down thread, there's analysts who pursue the solving of the Kryptos sculpture. Why not this puzzle?
> [T]he CIA revealed that their analyst David Stein had solved the same passages in 1998 using pencil and paper techniques, although at the time of his solution the information was only disseminated within the intelligence community.[9] No public announcement was made until July 1999,[10][11] although in November 1998 it was revealed that "a CIA analyst working on his own time [had] solved the lion's share of it".[12]
my hunch is that they guessed that the ciphers were a diversion created to waste resources
And moreover the previous ciphers didn't reveal anything about the identity of the killer either. It was just propaganda.
Not just propaganda, I think. From what I have read about the Zodiac killer it seems like he took personal delight and thrill in not getting caught and feeling like he was outwitting investigators. Purely for ego.
> Why haven't FBI analysts done the same already?
Because the FBI probably has few or no professional cryptographers. It's possible it could've been solved in a couple of days by the resources in-house at the NSA.
To clarify, I mean they probably have few people who spend time working on the math of crypto. They have lots of people who obviously know how to apply forensic software tools written by others to seized equipment.
Because the FBI probably has few or no professional cryptographers. It's possible it could've been solved in a couple of days by the resources in-house at the NSA.
To clarify, I mean they probably have few people who spend time working on the math of crypto. They have lots of people who obviously know how to apply forensic software tools written by others to seized equipment.
The article makes reference to the "FBI Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit". They appear to have people on staff who do exactly this kind of work.
From the FBI's web page (https://www.fbi.gov/services/laboratory/scientific-analysis/...):
> The Team
> Cryptanalysts and cryptanalyst forensic examiners.
...
> Cryptanalysis
> Decrypt manual codes and ciphers found in letters, notes, diaries, ledgers, and other types of written or electronic communications. Common users of codes include foreign and domestic terrorists, organized crime, gangs, prison inmates, and violent criminals.
From the FBI's web page (https://www.fbi.gov/services/laboratory/scientific-analysis/...):
> The Team
> Cryptanalysts and cryptanalyst forensic examiners.
...
> Cryptanalysis
> Decrypt manual codes and ciphers found in letters, notes, diaries, ledgers, and other types of written or electronic communications. Common users of codes include foreign and domestic terrorists, organized crime, gangs, prison inmates, and violent criminals.
While I don't think these other agencies would have been as interested as pursuing a decades-old cold case as a law enforcement effort, I could imagine that other orgs with codebreakers might try it as a side project or even a recreational diversion, much like trying to decrypt the Kryptos sculpture.
Individual analysts from the CIA, DIA, NIST, even foreign ones like the GCHQ, DGSE, Unit 8200, etc. could have tried to decipher the messages, in addition to the FBI. Surely they have the capacity to break this code, if they were inclined to spend some extra time on it. It's not as if these agencies don't recruit from people who already love solving puzzles in their free time.
Individual analysts from the CIA, DIA, NIST, even foreign ones like the GCHQ, DGSE, Unit 8200, etc. could have tried to decipher the messages, in addition to the FBI. Surely they have the capacity to break this code, if they were inclined to spend some extra time on it. It's not as if these agencies don't recruit from people who already love solving puzzles in their free time.
GCHQ have published two puzzle books in the UK and one of them definitely referred to the Zodiac Ciphers, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was a hobby project of a few of them. I do strongly believe if someone had previously solved it they'd have released it though -- there's nothing damaging in these texts.
This cipher is pure security-through obscurity and it held up well.
I don't think that's the usual meaning of security through obscurity, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
It's sounds like you're saying that something like a substitution cypher, or even a one-time pad, would be security by obscurity, because they key is "obscure."
My understanding is rather that security by obscurity means you're relying on the attacker not to have knowledge about you system -- e.g. that you have an admin backdoor at /s3cr3t-admin-pag3.html (real-world example), or that you can ping the server at an unpublished end point to get a token.
The opposite of security by obscurity is when the entire structure of your system is a complete open book (e.g. everything is completely open sourced) except the password, and yet the system is sound enough to resist an attack. But note that possessing a "secret" (a password, a key, a one-time pad, the substitution rules, etc) doesn't mean it's now security by obscurity.
It's sounds like you're saying that something like a substitution cypher, or even a one-time pad, would be security by obscurity, because they key is "obscure."
My understanding is rather that security by obscurity means you're relying on the attacker not to have knowledge about you system -- e.g. that you have an admin backdoor at /s3cr3t-admin-pag3.html (real-world example), or that you can ping the server at an unpublished end point to get a token.
The opposite of security by obscurity is when the entire structure of your system is a complete open book (e.g. everything is completely open sourced) except the password, and yet the system is sound enough to resist an attack. But note that possessing a "secret" (a password, a key, a one-time pad, the substitution rules, etc) doesn't mean it's now security by obscurity.
I see your point! I think you are totally right here. I think I fell for the trap of undermining the cipher just because it’s not based on modern crypto like prime factorization even though I was trying to praise it!
It can be fiendishly difficult to break a completely unknown cypher, or one that has key elements withheld, even if it's quite trivial to break if the encryption algorithm is known.
Can confirm.
Did a ROT-13/15 (vowels vs consonants, if it matters) test on _smart_ collegues. Turns out they fear the worst and start top-down.
Did a ROT-13/15 (vowels vs consonants, if it matters) test on _smart_ collegues. Turns out they fear the worst and start top-down.
Are you saying you did ROT-13 on vowels and ROT-15 on consonants? If so, that isn't a conformal mapping so how do you reverse it?
Were they experienced at breaking ciphers?
Plenty of smart people don't jump straight to a solution when seeing a ROT13 ciphertext, whereas I think most people who are experienced would realize pretty quickly there seems to be a simple transformation going on.
Plenty of smart people don't jump straight to a solution when seeing a ROT13 ciphertext, whereas I think most people who are experienced would realize pretty quickly there seems to be a simple transformation going on.
Think one of the most interesting things I learned in encryption, was that a random xor sheet the same length as your plaintext is perfect encryption.
That the problem only happens when you reuse that sheet.
This doesn’t apply here specifically, but if you would have told me this previously I would have assumed it was securing through obscurity.
That the problem only happens when you reuse that sheet.
This doesn’t apply here specifically, but if you would have told me this previously I would have assumed it was securing through obscurity.
It's worth expanding on that observation a bit.
What makes encryption "perfect"? This is not obvious, so I'll just skip ahead to the conclusion: encryption is perfect when it's impossible to distinguish which candidate plaintext led to a specific ciphertext without knowing the entire key.
It's easy to see that a one-time pad qualifies here. Even knowing all but one character of the plaintext doesn't give you any cryptographic way to determine what the last character is. The list of possible keys associating the known plaintext with the current ciphertext allows for every single character in the unknown position. This isn't a matter of computational power, it's an information-theoretic limit. You just don't have enough information (from the cryptography, anyway) to prefer any choice over another.
You can apply a pigeonhole principle argument here and see that this requires the key to have the same size as the message. (Something along the lines of each key specifying a permutation between messages of the same length, and you need the key size to be big enough to specify every possible permutation for that message length.)
That argument can then be used to demonstrate the information-theory quality of the encryption is related to the ratio between the lengths of the message and the key.
When you look at modern cryptography, you can see that we're not depending on information-theoretic security at all. If you had all but one characters of the plaintext and all the ciphertext, it's quite likely there'd only be one key that matches the known permutation. We've gone in a different direction: computational security. It should require an implausible amount of computation to derive what the key is, even when you know matching plaintext and ciphertext.
It's certainly more convenient than moving terabytes of key around, and computational limits are actually pretty compelling, as long as flaws aren't found in the construction.
But it lacks the satisfaction of provably unbreakable.
What makes encryption "perfect"? This is not obvious, so I'll just skip ahead to the conclusion: encryption is perfect when it's impossible to distinguish which candidate plaintext led to a specific ciphertext without knowing the entire key.
It's easy to see that a one-time pad qualifies here. Even knowing all but one character of the plaintext doesn't give you any cryptographic way to determine what the last character is. The list of possible keys associating the known plaintext with the current ciphertext allows for every single character in the unknown position. This isn't a matter of computational power, it's an information-theoretic limit. You just don't have enough information (from the cryptography, anyway) to prefer any choice over another.
You can apply a pigeonhole principle argument here and see that this requires the key to have the same size as the message. (Something along the lines of each key specifying a permutation between messages of the same length, and you need the key size to be big enough to specify every possible permutation for that message length.)
That argument can then be used to demonstrate the information-theory quality of the encryption is related to the ratio between the lengths of the message and the key.
When you look at modern cryptography, you can see that we're not depending on information-theoretic security at all. If you had all but one characters of the plaintext and all the ciphertext, it's quite likely there'd only be one key that matches the known permutation. We've gone in a different direction: computational security. It should require an implausible amount of computation to derive what the key is, even when you know matching plaintext and ciphertext.
It's certainly more convenient than moving terabytes of key around, and computational limits are actually pretty compelling, as long as flaws aren't found in the construction.
But it lacks the satisfaction of provably unbreakable.
One way to explain OTPs is a proof by induction.
The base step:
Start with one bit. The key is also a bit chosen at random, and the cipher text is plain XOR key.
You can then work out that no matter what key is chosen, you have no reason to believe 0 or 1 is the original plain text.
The inductive step is simply to add a new random bit of key that is independent from the prior key, and a new bit of plaintext.
What I like about this explanation is that you can actually work out the decision trees for a few bits to convince yourself that the encryption still holds.
The base step:
Start with one bit. The key is also a bit chosen at random, and the cipher text is plain XOR key.
You can then work out that no matter what key is chosen, you have no reason to believe 0 or 1 is the original plain text.
The inductive step is simply to add a new random bit of key that is independent from the prior key, and a new bit of plaintext.
What I like about this explanation is that you can actually work out the decision trees for a few bits to convince yourself that the encryption still holds.
Is that actually induction? The randomness of one ciphertext bit in the induction step doesn't depend on its previous bits. You're really just applying your base step multiple times.
The inductive step here is in the conjecture:
This algorithm is information-theoretic secure for a bitstring of length N
The grantparent's argument is to first convince yourself that a) this is true for a bitstring of length 1, and b) if it's true for a bitstring of length N, then it's also true for a bitstring of length N+1 (or alternately formulated: if it's true for bitstrings of length M and N, you can concat them and it will be true for a bitstring of length M+N)
The inductive step is then to apply this to show that because it's true for length 1, it's also true for length 2. And if it's true for length 2 then it's true for length 3. etc etc.
This algorithm is information-theoretic secure for a bitstring of length N
The grantparent's argument is to first convince yourself that a) this is true for a bitstring of length 1, and b) if it's true for a bitstring of length N, then it's also true for a bitstring of length N+1 (or alternately formulated: if it's true for bitstrings of length M and N, you can concat them and it will be true for a bitstring of length M+N)
The inductive step is then to apply this to show that because it's true for length 1, it's also true for length 2. And if it's true for length 2 then it's true for length 3. etc etc.
As far as I know that’s the idea of proof by induction: if a is true a+ 1 is true. A is true. Ergo it’s true for all possible numbers.
[deleted]
Then you might also like the fact that it can be implemented simply using transparent sheets:
https://www.douglas.stebila.ca/teaching/visual-one-time-pad/
IIRC this is exactly how OTP was used by some spies during the Cold War. (My compsci teacher actually showed us an 'original' pair of sheets that encoded a Chinese character).
Also shows it very neatly why reusing the sheet is a bad idea.
https://www.douglas.stebila.ca/teaching/visual-one-time-pad/
IIRC this is exactly how OTP was used by some spies during the Cold War. (My compsci teacher actually showed us an 'original' pair of sheets that encoded a Chinese character).
Also shows it very neatly why reusing the sheet is a bad idea.
That’s a very cool link! It was hard to line them up on mobile before I realized you Dan just click the links. I love little well coded no fanfare pages like that. Reminds me of the old internet.
one time pad! so impractical but so good
There's an interesting episode of Darknet Diaries where a former analyst at the NSA talks about OTPs and how he created an automated system for field agents to encipher and decipher them who found them exhausting to do manually.
Edit: Forgot the link https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/83/
Edit: Forgot the link https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/83/
so It held up pretty well, because he made several mistakes along the way, which made much harder than It is to figure out.
What does “much harder than it is” mean, it took 51 years to decipher it, that’s how hard it was.
He made mistakes using his own cypher.
Just curious. If someone were to start today, with today's computing power and knowledge of computers, how long would it take?
The answer to this can tell how easy it may be to create a similar problem today.
The answer to this can tell how easy it may be to create a similar problem today.
...and still the killer is unknown. That's pretty good, IMO.
What's the connection between the killer's identity still being unknown and the strength of this cipher? The killer lied: the plaintext doesn't contain personal information, or if it does, it's a riddle unrelated to the cipher.
The killer sent three cipers, my reading is that maybe 1-2 are now solved, they are not all solved yet. Are they?
They sent more than 3, the first 3 were solved quickly, this was a 4th that was sent years later. I believe the only undeciphered message is the text at the end of the 3rd cipher:
ebeorietemethhpiti
https://www.zodiacciphers.com/chronicle-letter.html
ebeorietemethhpiti
https://www.zodiacciphers.com/chronicle-letter.html
My error, article header mentioned 3 and then later said there was a forth.
> What's the connection between the killer's identity still being unknown and the strength of this cipher?
Maybe none.
This person killed several people, and THAT is your biggest problem?
Maybe none.
This person killed several people, and THAT is your biggest problem?
> This person killed several people, and THAT is your biggest problem?
There's a discussion about how strong the cipher is, and:
thatwasunusual> ...and still the killer is unknown. That's pretty good, IMO.
Someone pointed out that measuring the strength of the cipher by the fact that the killer is unknown is a bad metric, and you seem to believe this as a defence of murder?
They are merely pointing out there is no connection between the fact the killer is unknown and if the cipher was strong or weak.
There's a discussion about how strong the cipher is, and:
thatwasunusual> ...and still the killer is unknown. That's pretty good, IMO.
Someone pointed out that measuring the strength of the cipher by the fact that the killer is unknown is a bad metric, and you seem to believe this as a defence of murder?
They are merely pointing out there is no connection between the fact the killer is unknown and if the cipher was strong or weak.
I think the mistakes could have been intentional traps, to make code breaking more difficult and waste more resources. Once you solved it you can understand the message (good propaganda), but using misspelled words could throw off some attempts and generate "false negative" results when beginning to solve it, making detectives believe they are on the wrong tracks.
Given he fooled everyone for 40+ years I find it hard to believe he would overlook details, especially when it's about his main publicity tool.
Given he fooled everyone for 40+ years I find it hard to believe he would overlook details, especially when it's about his main publicity tool.
In his public (non encrypted) letters he has some spelling mistakes.
swiches instead of switches, cid instead of kid, figgure instead of figure, cerous instead of curious
There are more.
Even if it was intentional, I am not sure that spelling mistakes would make 60s/70s decryption attempts any worse. They did not work by brute force and it's unlikely he predicted someone will use a supercomputer to crack his code decades later.
swiches instead of switches, cid instead of kid, figgure instead of figure, cerous instead of curious
There are more.
Even if it was intentional, I am not sure that spelling mistakes would make 60s/70s decryption attempts any worse. They did not work by brute force and it's unlikely he predicted someone will use a supercomputer to crack his code decades later.
Mistakes? Or misdirection?
Wouldn't one of the "obscurity" features in this case be how few messages were encrypted with the cipher? If there were a larger database of encrypted messages, it may have been more susceptible.
I think so. These types of ciphers are definitely vulnerable to analysis across messages especially if you can make a guess about something common to both messages (eg - common ending like “sincerely”).
Obscurity can be a valid layer in a multilayered defense.
My defenses are multiple layers of obscurity.
Given your username, I suspect your method of obscurity is very good at putting people off the scent.
[deleted]
never roll your own crypto, but sometimes maybe ....?
never roll your own crypto is the type of advise the lead to heartbleed being so bad. it leads to a monoculture where one bug in the implimentaion makes everyone vulnerable.
Yeah. I think it is better to say “never roll your own crypto if your adversaries have infinite budgets and/or you have a lot to lose. Otherwise, knock yourself out!”
“Security-through obscurity” ——— that’s my quote of the week.
Some questions
1/how do we know we found the solution and not a decryption that gives a plausible message/solution. Aka how do we know this isn’t a false positive solution
2/have cryptologists studied possibility of “synthetic” cypher generation to bootstrap examples upon which an ML model could be trained to decrypt such message in the future ?
1/how do we know we found the solution and not a decryption that gives a plausible message/solution. Aka how do we know this isn’t a false positive solution
2/have cryptologists studied possibility of “synthetic” cypher generation to bootstrap examples upon which an ML model could be trained to decrypt such message in the future ?
1/ I think the "key" doesn't have enough entropy to encode the text generated. This should be good evidence towards it not being a false solution. If your key can't realistically encode enough information to "pick" out an arbitrary false plaintext, and yet the plaintext you have seems genuine judging by content, then you probably have a real decryption.
Also the way the cipher was done is plausible to the time period (that is, it's something you can do with pencil and paper), and the steps seem like something a human would do.
Also the way the cipher was done is plausible to the time period (that is, it's something you can do with pencil and paper), and the steps seem like something a human would do.
One subjective opinion puts this cipher as one of "Six top unsolved codes and ciphers"[0]. The other five also have interesting stories behind them, but the one I'm most looking forward to seeing solved is the fifth on the list, namely the Voynich Manuscript.
[0] https://mysteriouswritings.com/six-top-unsolved-codes-and-ci...
[0] https://mysteriouswritings.com/six-top-unsolved-codes-and-ci...
I went down that rabbit hole for years and I’m convinced voynich is a hoax and unsolvable.
I’d love to be wrong though.
I’d love to be wrong though.
From the little research I've read about it, the statistical properties of the Voynich Manuscript seem to be much closer to human language than to a text produced by any method that an ancient hoaxer would likely have come up with, but also not quite similar enough to human language that we shouldn't be suspicious of it.
Of course, for any statistical pattern that we might associate with human language, it is possible to design a random process which produces output with that pattern, but the more complex that algorithm is, the less likely it is that someone living 500 years ago would have come up with it, especially when a much simpler process would have been enough to trick their contemporaries.
One interesting example of statistical oddity is the presence of "words" (or "vords") repeated three or four times. That doesn't seem like a very natural sequence to find in a genuine text (especially in an era when documents were slow and expensive to write out longhand), but nor is it something that such an elaborate hoaxer would choose to include either, if they were trying to convince people that the text had meaning.
A perhaps related observation is the lack of crossings out or "mistakes" in the text. This might suggest that the person (or persons) writing the text didn't know or care what they were writing, or alternatively that they held the work in such high regard that they started with a fresh sheet whenever they made a mistake.
Of course, for any statistical pattern that we might associate with human language, it is possible to design a random process which produces output with that pattern, but the more complex that algorithm is, the less likely it is that someone living 500 years ago would have come up with it, especially when a much simpler process would have been enough to trick their contemporaries.
One interesting example of statistical oddity is the presence of "words" (or "vords") repeated three or four times. That doesn't seem like a very natural sequence to find in a genuine text (especially in an era when documents were slow and expensive to write out longhand), but nor is it something that such an elaborate hoaxer would choose to include either, if they were trying to convince people that the text had meaning.
A perhaps related observation is the lack of crossings out or "mistakes" in the text. This might suggest that the person (or persons) writing the text didn't know or care what they were writing, or alternatively that they held the work in such high regard that they started with a fresh sheet whenever they made a mistake.
My favorite take on the voynich manuscript:
https://xkcd.com/593/
https://xkcd.com/593/
Check out this link, in German, but seems to be solved: https://www.rainer-hannig.com/app/download/15835537224/Voyni...
Interesting, thank you. I hadn't looked into Rainer Hannig's proposed solution before, but it seems there is a lot of scepticism out there from experts who doubt the "transliterated Hebrew" hypothesis.
https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2020/07/26/mo...
https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2020/07/26/mo...
A thread on the original solution:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25390941
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25390941
Interesting coincidence that the earlier submission has 340 points. I'm upvoting this submission for the link to AZdecrypt:
https://www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=3198
Although it's a Windows executable, it looks like it's possible to build from the source in this repo:
https://github.com/doranchak/azdecrypt
https://www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=3198
Although it's a Windows executable, it looks like it's possible to build from the source in this repo:
https://github.com/doranchak/azdecrypt
Building from source won't remove the dependencies on WinAPI though. You would have to port the GUI to something cross-platform at least.
Amazing. It seems possible that the killer would have required a fairly advanced education to create a cypher with this complexity. Not too many self taught encryption creators exist out there.
Nothing really sticks out in the cipher as being inherently complex or requiring advanced education, it's more of just a puzzle where you're meant to figure out arbitrary rules, which in this case weren't even consistent throughout the entire cipher (adding some artificial difficulty). It's pretty out of scope of encryption because it was meant to be broken.
The cipher only uses two fairly simple techniques: transposition and homophonic substitution. Both of these are covered in any elementary book on codes and ciphers. Combining the two makes a cipher which is tough but not impossible to crack given a long enough ciphertext as demonstrated here.
This cipher isn't all that difficult, even compared to a simple modern cipher like DES. Ciphers are meant to withstand attacks if you know the rules (algorithm), this one doesn't, making it more of a puzzle than a cipher.
Robert Graysmith (and others?) suggested the Zodiac killer may have been in the Navy.
One of the Zodiac's letters contains a short 13-character cypher that he claims is his name:
https://zodiackiller.com/MyNameIsLetter.html
Given what we know of his methods, you'd think it would be possible to brute force this by now?
https://zodiackiller.com/MyNameIsLetter.html
Given what we know of his methods, you'd think it would be possible to brute force this by now?
That's half the unicity distance of English for even very simple monoalphabetic substitution ciphers. It's probably impossible even in theory to decode that using any amount of computing power.
According to Fayçal Ziraoui, the transcription would be "KAYR".
http://www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=5216
http://www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=5216
So is the only unsolved zodiac cipher the text at the end of this? Speculation is that it could just be filler text.
ebeorietemethhpiti
https://www.zodiacciphers.com/chronicle-letter.html
ebeorietemethhpiti
https://www.zodiacciphers.com/chronicle-letter.html
The My Name Is Letter is still unsolved.
https://zodiackiller.com/MyNameIsLetter.html
https://zodiackiller.com/MyNameIsLetter.html
ebeorietemethhpiti
I "tiph" (work? type?) in a navy called Demeter (or Metheor or Demeteiro)?
Demetrio is also a name
I "tiph" (work? type?) in a navy called Demeter (or Metheor or Demeteiro)?
Demetrio is also a name
What if the Zodiac Killer's plan all along wasn't to give the cops a chance at finding his name but simply give them false hope?
The FBI budget isn't unlimited and making them waste time breaking difficult ciphers, along with some early successes to keep the hope alive might make them overconfident in expending resources in cracking the ciphers instead of good old fashioned police work.
Then again...
The FBI budget isn't unlimited and making them waste time breaking difficult ciphers, along with some early successes to keep the hope alive might make them overconfident in expending resources in cracking the ciphers instead of good old fashioned police work.
Then again...
I think that was, at least partly, his intent. He even stated in the letter accompanying his first cipher that it would contain his identity, then when it was deciphered it said "I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOW DOWN OR STOP MY COLLECTING OF SLAV(E)S FOR MY AFTER LIFE".
I believe there might be a hidden message in the decrypted text itself. The reason I think this is that there seem to be filler words added to otherwise ordinary language. Example "I hope you are having fun in trying to catch me". Nobody would use the word "in" at that location in the sentence. If you ask me, something slightly more advanced still remains to be uncovered.
(prior to Dave solving this, I was also taking a crack at trying to solve this puzzle https://twitter.com/BlockJon/status/1292555925564395521)
(prior to Dave solving this, I was also taking a crack at trying to solve this puzzle https://twitter.com/BlockJon/status/1292555925564395521)
> Nobody would use the word "in" at that location in the sentence.
Except that was, once upon a time, a very common phrasing. As the writer was coming from the 60/70s, you need to adjust your expectations of English.
"in trying to" is actually incredibly common for what might be called "Oxford English". You'll still find it in heavy use in newspapers.
So rather than suggesting the speaker is making a deliberate mistake, or is not a native speaker, it might simply be suggesting a formal education - something that already matches the profile of the Zodiac killer.
Except that was, once upon a time, a very common phrasing. As the writer was coming from the 60/70s, you need to adjust your expectations of English.
"in trying to" is actually incredibly common for what might be called "Oxford English". You'll still find it in heavy use in newspapers.
So rather than suggesting the speaker is making a deliberate mistake, or is not a native speaker, it might simply be suggesting a formal education - something that already matches the profile of the Zodiac killer.
I still use and hear phrasing like that, given I am Australian in a state where the Queens English held tight that makes sense to me.
No native English speaker would use “in” but that construction isn’t unheard of.
As another commentor pointed out, it can be found in the Queens English/Oxford English.
I use and hear it occasionally still.
I use and hear it occasionally still.
This is awesome. Now I'd like to see someone recreate the original hand-written mechanism the killer used to create the cypher.
It's pretty simple really. First you need to write out your plaintext and count the frequency of each of the letters in the plaintext.
Now choose a set of 40+ symbols to do the homophonic substitution. You randomly assign these to the letters A-Z making sure you assign more to the letters that you use the most in your plaintext (probably e and t having the most)
Now decide on an arrangement of the plaintext (transposition cipher), this may involve writing diagonally or spirally or in any pattern that can be conveyed as a key and is easy to write out.
Finally, substitute the symbols, where you have a choice of more than one symbol pick one randomly. This should be done randomly rather than methodically to make the cipher the toughest to decrypt, you could use dice to do this.
The decryption key that you pass to anyone wanting to decrypt the ciphertext is the set of symbol substitutions and the way that you have transposed the symbols. (E.g. spiral going clockwise from top right)
Now choose a set of 40+ symbols to do the homophonic substitution. You randomly assign these to the letters A-Z making sure you assign more to the letters that you use the most in your plaintext (probably e and t having the most)
Now decide on an arrangement of the plaintext (transposition cipher), this may involve writing diagonally or spirally or in any pattern that can be conveyed as a key and is easy to write out.
Finally, substitute the symbols, where you have a choice of more than one symbol pick one randomly. This should be done randomly rather than methodically to make the cipher the toughest to decrypt, you could use dice to do this.
The decryption key that you pass to anyone wanting to decrypt the ciphertext is the set of symbol substitutions and the way that you have transposed the symbols. (E.g. spiral going clockwise from top right)
I've seen speculation that his method may have been as simple as the ancient Spartan Scytale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scytale).
I wonder if the author has considered taking a crack at passage 4 of the Kryptos cipher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos
There is a strong parallel between them - the solution to Z340 depended on the observation (independently by two people) that there was an unusually high number of repeated bigrams at width 19. For K4, there's an unusually high number of repeated bigrams at width 21 and that pattern is much stronger than with Z340.
The problem is nobody has guessed the method for K4 (and the message is much shorter at 97 characters). With Z340 there was the important context of Z408 and the underlying method of homophonic substitution. With K4 if people get into it enough, they usually try the polyalphabetic substitution of K1 or K2, or combine that with transposition ideas, influenced by K3, try that for while, and give up. Nobody will know the method for sure until it's been solved.
Another parallel: Z340 "rates at about a 7 or 8 out of 10 in difficulty to decipher" according to Oranchak. When Ed Scheidt, the designer of the Kryptos codes, was asked the same question about K4 he said "I would think like a nine, it's way up there".
The problem is nobody has guessed the method for K4 (and the message is much shorter at 97 characters). With Z340 there was the important context of Z408 and the underlying method of homophonic substitution. With K4 if people get into it enough, they usually try the polyalphabetic substitution of K1 or K2, or combine that with transposition ideas, influenced by K3, try that for while, and give up. Nobody will know the method for sure until it's been solved.
Another parallel: Z340 "rates at about a 7 or 8 out of 10 in difficulty to decipher" according to Oranchak. When Ed Scheidt, the designer of the Kryptos codes, was asked the same question about K4 he said "I would think like a nine, it's way up there".
I only came across K4 today but surely the decrypted text is a reference to Victoria, Goddess of Victory, or the Brandenburg Gate. Tear down this wall!
So there are still spelling errors in the result, is this just due to the zodiac killer being bad at encryption initially?
"Paradice" was a well known misspelling of his, and actually aided in validating the solution based on others' accounts of breaking this code.
These days where kids have school-issued Chrome laptops and whatnot, the FBI would simply ask Google to grep for "paradice" in the records for every school district and within a few hours we'd have pretty good list of suspects.
Or you wouldn't because every kid using Google Doc would be using Smart Compose autocomplete feature and corrector making everyone's prose very homogeneous.
This might be naive but, in the age before spell check, I wonder if a lot of people consistently made spelling mistakes like this. I mean you wouldn’t know you were wrong unless you checked in the dictionary.
Yes, of course. When the red swiggle first began to manifest, I remember noticing quite a few words that I had been spelling in a specific way, often informed more or less by orthography and etymology, but still incorrectly. For those who struggled with a lot of words, their misspellings could be nearly as distinctive as their handwriting.
I think "paradice" is likely an intentional mistake on the Zodiac's part, though. His apparent level of education doesn't fit with him being unfamiliar with that word.
I think "paradice" is likely an intentional mistake on the Zodiac's part, though. His apparent level of education doesn't fit with him being unfamiliar with that word.
He had more spelling mistakes, cerous instead of curious, etc.
It's possible he did it intentionally but I don't think this cipher is proof he was highly educated.
It's possible he did it intentionally but I don't think this cipher is proof he was highly educated.
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there's speculation that he was spelling badly on purpose to make it harder to compare to his real-life writing style
Sure. I'm a good speller but there are a few words that I learned the wrong way and had a blind spot for. I discovered I had been spelling them wrong all my life when Word kept underlining them in red.
In related news, Japanese teachers lament the fact that predictive text entry systems on their students' phones mean that they don't know how to write kanji anymore. They can recognize them, but don't have enough practice to write them consistently anymore.
In related news, Japanese teachers lament the fact that predictive text entry systems on their students' phones mean that they don't know how to write kanji anymore. They can recognize them, but don't have enough practice to write them consistently anymore.
in earlier messages from zodiac he spelled PARADICE too, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zodiac-back.pdf
Some of the spelling errors were common in his messages, especially “paradice”.
if you crib for many words you can decode the message you are hoping for. That seems like the bias in machine learning. So you try to crib for words until the message seems appropriate for you, but maybe the decryption is not correct.
People have an extraordinary capacity to connect words to make it sound like there is some real meaning. But the decrypted words were not naturally found by the algorithm but suggested by the authors. To test my hypothesis, about the lack of credibility of such a method of decrypting, I suggest to decode the same message thinking that the author of the plaintext is someone who got rich by a lottery prize. You may try millions crib like "I like millions", "I am rich" "I will win the lottery", and the like. And finally you will communicate to your audience only the few words that work for you to "decrypt" the message.
I think the result will be something along the lines of:
You finally won the big prize, the millions are yours, congratulations.
What I am saying is trivially true for a very short plaintext, think of txyz and invent any work you like. So there must be a trade-off between the space of solutions and the message length, a signal to noise ratio. The solution propose 3 part of the z340, and each one add new capacity to the channel of solutions. Perhaps something like the VC dimension. caveat: I am not a cryptographer.
Perhaps something like: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/22/4/438/htm
What I am saying is trivially true for a very short plaintext, think of txyz and invent any work you like. So there must be a trade-off between the space of solutions and the message length, a signal to noise ratio. The solution propose 3 part of the z340, and each one add new capacity to the channel of solutions. Perhaps something like the VC dimension. caveat: I am not a cryptographer.
Perhaps something like: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/22/4/438/htm
What a creepy mystery, glad it’s cracked though.
We still don't know who was the killer.
Waiting for the Netflix documentary...
There are already so many documentaries on Zodiac. It's probably my favorite case because of the ciphers and letters. Unfortunately I'm not sure we'll ever catch him. I personally believe it was likely Arthur Leigh Allen, but it's also possible that he was just a fanboy and loved the attention of people thinking he was The Zodiac.
Oh right.
Well...we have one asset figured out.
Well...we have one asset figured out.
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I'm curious - if the same thing, with the same approach to encryption would be written in non-English language (Russian, for example, or Hungarian) - would it be ever be cracked?
Seems like many tools/approaches used were english-specific, and unless some lucky guess/hit, they wouldn't be applicable to other languates.
Seems like many tools/approaches used were english-specific, and unless some lucky guess/hit, they wouldn't be applicable to other languates.
I think the English-speaking world kind of has a target on its back in terms of cybersecurity because everyone who can use a computer (a slight exaggeration) has some knowledge of English, but not everyone has knowledge of Farsi or Korean or Icelandic or whatever. So if just about any hacker comes across a vulnerability in your English-language system, they'll recognize it. Meanwhile, if I stumbled upon a link that gave me unauthorized access to a Hungarian-language system, I'd have no idea.
The zodiac should’ve used the plaintext of the first 3 messages as a one time pad key for the forth
David's reddit account, for those interested in seeing more from the source: https://www.reddit.com/user/doranchak
Why are the K's all V's when there are multiple K's but only 1 V... why not make the V's K's so that more chars match their intentions
The author's name is Blake, but AFAICT this has no relationship with the crypto hash algo BLAKE/BLAKE2 (by Aumasson, Neves, Henzen, et al).
I don't know quite why this comment drew some negative attention.
I read 'Blake' and thought, "oh neat I wonder if this person also did a popular crypto hash that I've seen?" I looked it up and found out that in fact they didn't and it's not named after anyone AFAICT. So I meant this as purely informational for anyone else who might've thought the same thing.
Sorry if it was an off-topic comment.
I read 'Blake' and thought, "oh neat I wonder if this person also did a popular crypto hash that I've seen?" I looked it up and found out that in fact they didn't and it's not named after anyone AFAICT. So I meant this as purely informational for anyone else who might've thought the same thing.
Sorry if it was an off-topic comment.
I still suspect machine learning would be efficient enough at deciphering this kind of thing.
I'm sometimes scared of reading crazy people writing, because I fear that their arguments and points might make sense and end up breaking my mind...
And the top Hacker News submission right now is
"Superior IQs are associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests"
"Superior IQs are associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests"
This news broke a few weeks ago and a few write ups were already published.
We shouldn’t support the killer by indulging in his psychotic delusions of grandeur. I believe this work is immoral.
really impressive the code kept uncracked for such a long time
While the puzzle has been solved and it turned out to be real mind bender, it may be the end result that that killer may have wanted all along.
There is so much buzz around it (movie, subreddits, forums, and whatnot) that it really bums me out that we gave such a heinous criminal so much time and attention.
(1) "He sought many things from his act of terror, but one was notoriety - that is why you will never hear me mention his name," Ms Ardern said in an emotional address at New Zealand's parliament.