American and Swedish linguists have succeeded in an encrypted document from the end of the 18th century to decipher. The creators of the Copiale Cipher made use of the difficult to decipher homofone substitution technique.
The Copiale Cipher is a document of 105 pages with over 75.000 characters, that the end of the 18th century were recorded. The manuscript is composed of unfamiliar abstract symbols, interspersed with Latin characters. The name comes from one of only two annotations in plain text. The document was discovered in an archive of an institute in the former East Berlin and is now in private hands.
The American computer scientist Kevin Knight of the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California began this year along with linguists Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of the Swedish Uppsala university in the decryption of the first 16 pages.
The code was found via homofone substitution converted, with a alfabetletter in different characters can be converted, which makes it difficult is the plain text through analysis of the frequency distribution to unravel. Also, the researchers initially led astray by the Latin alphabet, which they thought that the so-called nulls, which have no meaning. The scientists knew ultimately the input to assume that the original language is German and the characters with a circumflex for the same letter were. The Latin characters are proved for spaces. The team describes the decryption in the document, The Copiale Cipher.
The decrypted text was related to the rituals and political entanglements of a German secret society. “Historians believe that secret societies played a role in revolutions, but a lot of this is unclear, partly because many of the documents are encrypted,” says Knight.