How Does Historical Cryptology Work?

only be unlocked by someone possessing the key. Before the computer age, if a historian came across a coded message and an archive of material, they would usually skip over it because it just wasn't worth the trouble. Even ancient ciphers can be nearly impossible to crack with just a pencil and paper. But what juicy historical secrets were trapped

in those ancient puzzles. For the article this episode is based on, has Stuff Works spoke with Craig P. Bauer, a math professor at York College of Pennsylvania and editor in chief of the journal Cryptologia. He said, if you're looking through a diary and you come across a passage that's enciphered, you know that's the best part. When a message can't be read, the sky's the limit. It can

be absolutely anything. It can resolve a historic mystery or shed new light on the personality of a historic figure. Maybe history itself is rewritten, and Bower should know. His journal made history in February of twenty twenty three by publishing the work of three amateur codebreakers who decrypted a trove of secret letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots.

The encoded letters date to the fifteen hundreds, during Mary's nineteen year imprisonment by Queen Elizabeth the First and show how Mary remained a shrewd political operative even while locked away in a castle. The letters contain about fifty thousand words of writing, enough to fill a book. Historians are

sure to be digging into them for a good while. Interestingly, they're mostly addressed to the French ambassador to England at the time, and indicate that Mary was directly or indirectly in touch with many of the major players in Elizabeth's court. The team that cracked the letters harnessed powerful codebreaking technology that wasn't available even a decade ago, and those new tools have ushered in what Bauer calls the Second Golden age of decipherment. The question is what secrets will these

historical codebreakers uncover? Next, let's talk about historical cryptology. Cryptology is the study of both writing and breaking codes. When we think of cryptologists, we might picture someone like the British mathematician Alan Turing, who cracked Nazi Germany's infamous Enigma machine during World War Two. But cryptologists don't just work for intelligence agencies. There are also amateur codebreakers who are fascinated with solving historical puzzles. A Bower is one of them.

He wrote a book called Unsolved, The History and Mystery of the World's Greatest Ciphers from Ancient Egypt to online secret societies. In it, he cataloged some of the biggest ciphers that historical cryptologists are itching to crack. The Zodiac

cipher used to be one of them. For fifty one years, no one could solve the riddle of the three hundred and forty character coded message written in nineteen sixty nine by the infamous Zodiac Killer, and then a team of amateur cryptologists cracked it in twenty twenty one using supercomputers and custom decryption software. The killer's identity still remains a mystery, though in recent years, historical cryptologists have broken ciphers created

by the KKK, Marie Antoinette, and the Masons. They even figured out how to decrypt the infamous RAHNK Codex, an ancient illustrated manuscript discovered in the eighteen thirties that's written in an unknown language. A. Bauer is quick to point out that it takes more than just raw computing power to break an ancient code. He said, a good historical cryptologist has to be part countant, able to very carefully keep track of numbers and statistics, but they also need

to have the spirit of Mozart. You have to be very creative and almost a psychologist to guess the keywords or phrases to unlock the cipher. It requires a combination of creativity, powerful computers, and persistence. If you lose one

leg of that stool, you won't find a solution. The team who deciphered Queen Mary's code used a process called hill climbing, where a computer randomly assigns the symbols and the cipher two letters of the alphabet, decrypts the whole message, scores it based on readability, and then repeats the process only keeping the changes that increase the score of the translation. After the code was cracked, the cryptologists still needed to decipher the coded letters one word at a time and

edit transcriptions, a process that took a year. Every cipher is created by some kind of algorithm or formula, and Bauer says that encryption algorithms can be extremely complex, like the unbreakable end to end encryption that safeguards data traveling across the Internet, or extremely simple alike Julius Caesar's formula in which he shifted each letter in the alphabet three letters over. In cryptology terms, Caesar's method is called transposition.

That's any system that moves the letters of the alphabet around or scrambles their order. A transposition cipher appears a few times in the Hebrew Bible, in which the first letter of the alphabet is swapped with the last letter, the second letter with the second to last, and so on. A far more difficult cipher to solve is one that employs substitution, in which the letters or words in the original message are replaced by other random letters, numbers, or symbols.

Substitution ciphers are created by using a key or a cipher alphabet. A Mary, Queen of Scots, used a cipher alphabet that replaced each word with a unique symbols. Such a cipher could only be decoded by someone possessing the same key. To make a cipher even harder to crack, two different cipher keys could be employed simultaneously. These are called polyalphabetic ciphers. So maybe you use one key for the first word of a sentence and a different key

for the second word. Null symbols might be added that have no meaning, just to throw off the codebreakers. Another trick is to assign several different symbols to the most common words, a tactic called homophonic substitution. The three guys who solved the Queen Mary mystery all have day jobs. George Lassary is a computer scientist living in Israel. Norbert Bierman is a music professor in Germany, and Satoshi Tomokio

is an atrophysicist in Japan. They each had a passion for historical ciphers, but it's unlikely any one of them would have solved the riddle all on their own. The three men found each other as part of the decrypt project, and international effort to bring historians and cryptologists together and give them the computational tools to decipherb ancient encrypted texts. In the past, codebreakers and historians mostly worked on stubborn

problems in isolation, but that's changing, Bowers said. A lot of the great work in cryptology is done in teams of two or more people. George Laspree has established himself as the best codebreaker outside of the government. He and his teammates are tearing things up. Today's episode is based on the article why historical cryptologists need to be part Mozart, part accountant on houstofworks dot com, written by Dave Bruce.

Brainstuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.