Copiale cipher
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The Copiale cipher is an
encrypted In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can decip ...
manuscript consisting of 75,000 handwritten characters filling 105 pages in a bound volume. Undeciphered for more than 260 years, the document was cracked in 2011 with the help of modern computer techniques. An international team consisting of Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California
Information Sciences Institute The USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a component of the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering, and specializes in research and development in information processing, computing, and communications techno ...
and
Viterbi School of Engineering The USC Viterbi School of Engineering (formerly the USC School of Engineering) is the engineering school of the University of Southern California. It was renamed following a $52 million donation by Andrew J. Viterbi, co-founder of Qualcomm. ...
, along with Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of
Uppsala University Uppsala University ( sv, Uppsala universitet) is a public university, public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the List of universities in Sweden, oldest university in Sweden and the Nordic countries still in opera ...
in Sweden, found the cipher to be an encrypted German text. The manuscript is a
homophonic cipher In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encrypting in which units of plaintext are replaced with the ciphertext, in a defined manner, with the help of a key; the "units" may be single letters (the most common), pairs of letters, trip ...
that uses a complex substitution code, including symbols and letters, for its text and spaces.''New York Times''
John Markoff, "How revolutionary tools cracked a 1700s code," October 24, 2011
retrieved October 25, 2011
Previously examined by scientists at the
German Academy of Sciences at Berlin The German Academy of Sciences at Berlin, german: Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (DAW), in 1972 renamed the Academy of Sciences of the GDR (''Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR (AdW)''), was the most eminent research institution ...
in the 1970s, the cipher was thought to date from between 1760 and 1780. Decipherment revealed that the document had been created in the 1730s by a
secret society A secret society is a club or an organization whose activities, events, inner functioning, or membership are concealed. The society may or may not attempt to conceal its existence. The term usually excludes covert groups, such as intelligence a ...

(the complete proceedings) o

(the relevant presentation): Knight, Kevin, Megyesi, Beáta and Schaefer, Christiane "The Copiale Cipher," Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on building and using comparable corpora, pages 2–9, 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Comparable Linguistics, 24 June 2011. Retrieved October 25, 2011
called the "high enlightened (Hocherleuchtete) oculist order" of
Wolfenbüttel Wolfenbüttel (; nds, Wulfenbüddel) is a town in Lower Saxony, Germany, the administrative capital of Wolfenbüttel District. It is best known as the location of the internationally renowned Herzog August Library and for having the largest c ...
, or Oculists. The Oculists used ''sight'' as a metaphor for knowledge. The manuscript is in private collection. A parallel manuscript is kept at the Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel. The Copiale cipher includes abstract symbols, as well as letters from
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
and most of the
Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: *Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a letter ...
alphabet. The only plain text in the book is "Copiales 3" at the end and "Philipp 1866" on the flyleaf. Philipp is thought to have been an owner of the manuscript. Includes images of the full text, as well as full translations in German and English. The plain-text letters of the message were found to be encoded by accented Roman letters, Greek letters and symbols, with unaccented Roman letters serving only to represent spaces. The researchers found that the initial 16 pages describe an Oculist initiation ceremony. The manuscript portrays, among other things, an initiation ritual in which the candidate is asked to read a blank piece of paper and, on confessing inability to do so, is given eyeglasses and asked to try again, and then again after washing the eyes with a cloth, followed by an "operation" in which a single eyebrow hair is plucked.


Substitution cipher

The Copiale cipher is a
substitution cipher In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encrypting in which units of plaintext are replaced with the ciphertext, in a defined manner, with the help of a key; the "units" may be single letters (the most common), pairs of letters, trip ...
. It is not a 1-for-1 substitution but rather a
homophonic cipher In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encrypting in which units of plaintext are replaced with the ciphertext, in a defined manner, with the help of a key; the "units" may be single letters (the most common), pairs of letters, trip ...
: each ciphertext character stands for a particular plaintext character, but several ciphertext characters may encode the same plaintext character. For example, all the unaccented Roman characters encode a space. Seven ciphertext characters encode the single letter "e". In addition, some ciphertext characters stand for several characters or even a word. One ciphertext character ("†") encodes "sch", and another encodes the secret society's name.


Decryption method

A machine translation expert, Knight approached language translation as if all languages were ciphers, effectively treating foreign words as symbols for English words. His approach, which tasked an expectation-maximization algorithm with generating every possible match of foreign and English words, enabled the algorithm to figure out a few words with each pass. A comparison with 80 languages confirmed that the original language was likely German, which the researchers had guessed based on the word "Philipp," a German spelling. Knight then used a combination of intuition and computing techniques to decipher most of the code in a few weeks. Megyesi later realized that a particular symbol meant "eye", and Schaefer connected that discovery to the Oculists.


The Oculists

The Oculists were a group of
ophthalmologists Ophthalmology ( ) is a surgical subspecialty within medicine that deals with the diagnosis and treatment of eye disorders. An ophthalmologist is a physician who undergoes subspecialty training in medical and surgical eye care. Following a medic ...
led by Count Friedrich August von Veltheim, who died in April 1775. The Philipp 1866 Copiales 3 document, however, appears to suggest that the Oculists, or at least Count Veltheim, were a group of
Freemasons Freemasonry or Masonry refers to fraternal organisations that trace their origins to the local guilds of stonemasons that, from the end of the 13th century, regulated the qualifications of stonemasons and their interaction with authorities ...
who created the Oculist society in order to pass along the Masonic rites which had recently been banned by
Pope Clement XII Pope Clement XII ( la, Clemens XII; it, Clemente XII; 7 April 16526 February 1740), born Lorenzo Corsini, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 12 July 1730 to his death in February 1740. Clement presided over the ...
.


See also

*
List of ciphertexts Some famous ciphertexts (or cryptograms), in chronological order by date, are: See also * Undeciphered writing systems (cleartext, natural-language writing of unknown meaning) External links * Elonka Dunin Elonka Dunin (; born December ...
*
Voynich manuscript The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an otherwise unknown writing system, referred to as 'Voynichese'. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and stylistic anal ...


References


External links

* * * {{cite web , url= http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale-translation.pdf , title= English translation History of cryptography Classical ciphers