The universes of cryptography 26 methods

Symbols through history

Enigma, Mary Queen of Scots, agent Bazeries, VIC, Dada-Urka, Kryptos, Zodiac: ciphers that played a real historical role — wars, royal plots, diplomatic espionage, unsolved crimes.

Spotlight cipher

Enigma machine

The famous WWII German machine. Breaking Enigma founded modern computing.

Polyalpha. 1918-1945, Arthur Scherbius then German military Arthur Scherbius

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Cryptography in active service

Every cipher in this universe shares a quality the others lack: it had a measurable historical impact. A battle, a trial, a murder, a plot, a capital execution, a diplomatic revolution.

Not parlour cryptography — cryptography in active service, with its victims, its glories and its ghosts.

Enigma and Bletchley Park

The summit is Enigma. Invented by Arthur Scherbius in 1918, sold to the Reichswehr in 1925, massively adopted by the Wehrmacht in 1934, it protects the overwhelming majority of German communications during the Second World War.

Poles Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski crack its early versions as early as 1932 — a stunningly intelligent mathematical feat, handed to the British in 1939. At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing mechanises and industrialises cryptanalysis with the electromechanical bombes, and the war is won — according to most historians’ estimates — between two and four years earlier thanks to those decryptions.

Mary Stuart, Walsingham, the Babington Plot

Before Enigma, Mary Queen of Scots corresponds from her English prison with her Catholic supporters using a homophonic substitution cipher.

Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster, intercepts her exchanges with Anthony Babington in 1586, decrypts them, and triggers the Scottish queen’s execution. The Bazeries cipher (Étienne Bazeries, French Army cryptographer) sees service in the 1890s. During the Cold War the VIC, used by Soviet agent Reino Häyhänen, is recovered by the FBI in 1953 inside a hollow five-cent coin.

Kryptos, Zodiac, Dada-Urka: modern icons

Kryptos, Jim Sanborn’s 1990 sculpture in the CIA courtyard, three of whose four panels have been broken. The Zodiac Killer mails four cryptograms to Californian newspapers between 1969 and 1974 — the Z408 falls in a week, the Z340 in fifty years (December 2020), the Z13 and Z32 still hold.

The Dada-Urka ciphers of Ukrainian nationalists, the Daggers of murder cases, the Ave Maria of fugitive monks — all of them carry true stories.

Cryptanalysis = historical investigation

Why do these ciphers deserve a universe of their own? Because their study is as historical as it is mathematical. You cannot understand Enigma without Turing, you cannot understand Mary Stuart without Walsingham, you cannot understand Bazeries without the 1870 revanche.

Every CipherChronicle method page in this universe tells both: the cryptographic mechanic and the historical context that carried it. That, in the end, is also how the discipline is best learned — the moment a cipher stops being a maths exercise and becomes a character in a novel.

Catalogue

Methods in this universe

26 methods