Today I learned about the decipherment of Linear B. Linear B, like the Rosetta Stone, was an ancient piece of text, this time originating from ancient Crete, and was deciphered using cryptoanalysis techniques. However, Linear B uses a syllabic script, so it was much harder to decipher than the Rosetta Stone. It was eventually deciphered,

Today I continued reading the Code Book, and learned about the evolution(or lack thereof) of ciphers in World War 1. In the late 1800s, around the time of the Crimean War, the Babbage-Kasiski method had rendered the Vignere cipher obsolete. After that, cryptography began to stagnate. New ciphers were still devised, but none could match

So far in cryptography history, substitution ciphers were vanquished by frequency analysis. However, a new cipher would rise, one that proved to be the first real challenge to frequency analysis: the homophonic cipher. The homophonic cipher was similar to a substitution cipher, but instead of using one symbol to replace another symbol, there would be

In my previous post, I defined substitution ciphers, and how to decrypt them through frequency analysis. In this post, I will discuss various substitution ciphers that were used throughout history. One substitution cipher simply uses a random permutation of the letters of the alphabet as the key; this was the example I used in the

Today I began my research into the subject of cryptography by reading The Code Book by Simon Singh. One of the first things I learned was the difference between stenography and cryptography. Both are methods of transmitting messaged secretly. However, the methods which both utilize differ greatly. When one sends a message with stenography, they