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Friday, July 03, 2009

Encoding liberty 

By TigerHawk at 7/03/2009 01:08:00 AM


More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson received a letter in a cipher that has only just been broken (by, as it happens, a cryptographer in a government facility not a mile from my house). Turned out it was a joke, albeit a respectful one.

CWCID: Volokh.


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3 Comments:

By Anonymous tyree, at Fri Jul 03, 02:02:00 AM:

Very cool. I hope they can work this in to the next "National Treasure" film.  

By Blogger Unknown, at Fri Jul 03, 09:26:00 AM:

TH: That should read 'cryptanalyst'. A cryptographer creates ciphers. A cryptanalyst breaks them.  

By Anonymous Anonymous, at Fri Jul 03, 11:31:00 PM:

Speaking of Thomas Jefferson, he also invented an encryption device, the Jefferson Disk.

You can read more about it at wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_disk

There is only one "slight" problem with this wikipedia entry. They use "heilhitler" as the text to show how this device worked.

Vilmos  

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