Information is an important commodity.

Nations, corporations and individuals protect secret information with

encryption, using a variety of methods ranging from substituting one letter for another to using a complex algorithm
to encrypt a message. On the other side of the information equation are people who use a combination of logic and
intuition to uncover secret information. These people are cryptanalysts, also known as code breakers.

Carston Müller, SXC

Binary code is the basis for many modern ciphers.
A person who communicates through secret writing is called a cryptographer. Cryptographers might use codes,
ciphers or a combination of both to keep messages safe from others. What cryptographers create, cryptanalysts
attempt to unravel.
Throughout the history of cryptography, people who created codes or ciphers were often convinced their systems
were unbreakable. Cryptanalysts have proven these people wrong by relying on everything from the scientific method
to a lucky guess. Today, even the amazingly complex encryption schemes common in Internet transactions may have
a limited useful lifetime -- quantum computing might make solving such difficult equations a snap.

You Say Cryptology, I Say Cryptography

In English, the words cryptology and cryptography are often
interchangeable -- both refer to the science of secret writing.
Some people prefer to differentiate the words, using cryptology to
refer to the science and cryptography to refer to the practice of
secret writing.
In this article, we'll look at some of the most popular codes and cipher systems used throughout history. We'll learn
about the techniques cryptanalysts use to break codes and ciphers, and what steps cryptographers can take to make
their messages more difficult to figure out. At the end, you'll get the chance to take a crack at an enciphered
message.

To learn how code breakers crack secret messages, you need to know how people create codes. In the next section,
we'll learn about some of the earliest attempts at hiding messages.
Polybius Squares and Caesar Shifts
Although historical findings show that several ancient civilizations used elements of ciphers and codes in their writing,
code experts say that these examples were meant to give the message a sense of importance and formality. The
person writing the message intended for his audience to be able to read it.
The Greeks were one of the first civilizations to use ciphers to communicate in secrecy. A Greek scholar named
Polybius proposed a system for enciphering a message in which a cryptographer represented each letter with a pair
of numbers ranging from one to five using a 5-by-5 square (the letters I and J shared a square). The Polybius Square
(sometimes called the checkerboard) looks like this:
1 2 3 4 5
1 A B C D E
2 F G H I/J K
3 L M N O P
4 Q R S T U
5 V W X Y Z
A cryptographer would write the letter "B" as "12". The letter O is "34". To encipher the phrase "How Stuff Works," the
cryptographer would write "233452 4344452121 5234422543." Because he replaces each letter with two numbers,
it's difficult for someone unfamiliar with the code to determine what this message means. The cryptographer could
make it even more difficult by mixing up the order of the letters instead of writing them out alphabetically.
Julius Caesar invented another early cipher -- one that was very simple and yet confounded his enemies. He created
enciphered messages by shifting the order of the alphabet by a certain number of letters. For example, if you were to
shift the English alphabet down three places, the letter "D" would represent the letter "A," while the letter "E" would
mean "B" and so forth. You can visualize this code by writing the two alphabets on top of one another with the
corresponding plaintext and cipher matching up like this:
Plaintext a b c d e f g h i j k l m
Cipher D E F G H I J K L M N O P
Plaintext n o p q r s t u v w x y z
Cipher Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C

Notice that the cipher alphabet wraps around to "A" after reaching "Z." Using this cipher system, you could encipher
the phrase "How Stuff Works" as "KRZ VWXII ZRUNV."
Both of these systems, the Polybius Square and the Caesar Shift, formed the basis of many future cipher systems.
In the next section, we'll look at a few of these more advanced methods of encryption.

Deciphering the Language

To encipher a message means to replace the letters in the text
with the replacement alphabet. The readable message is called
the plaintext. The cryptographer converts the plaintext into a
cipher and sends it on. The recipient of the message uses the
proper technique, called the key, to decipher the message,
changing it from a cipher back into a plaintext.
The Trimethius Tableau
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Western world entered what we now call the Dark Ages. During this time,
scholarship declined and cryptography suffered the same fate. It wasn't until the Renaissance that cryptography
again became popular. The Renaissance was not only a period of intense creativity and learning, but also of intrigue,
politics, warfare and deception.
Cryptographers began to search for new ways to encipher messages. The Caesar Shift was too easy to crack --
given enough time and patience, almost anyone could uncover the plaintext behind the ciphered text. Kings and
priests hired scholars to come up with new ways to send secret messages.
One such scholar was Johannes Trimethius, who proposed laying out the alphabet in a matrix, or tableau. The matrix
was 26 rows long and 26 columns wide. The first row contained the alphabet as it is normally written. The next row
used a Caesar Shift to move the alphabet over one space. Each row shifted the alphabet another spot so that the
final row began with "Z" and ended in "Y." You could read the alphabet normally by looking across the first row or
down the first column. It looks like this:

As you can see, each row is a Caesar Shift. To encipher a letter, the cryptographer picks a row and uses the top row
as the plaintext guide. A cryptographer using the 10th row, for example, would encipher the plaintext letter "A" as "J."
Trimethius didn't stop there -- he suggested that cryptographers encipher messages by using the first row for the first
letter, the second row for the second letter, and so on down the tableau. After 26 consecutive letters, the
cryptographer would start back at the first row and work down again until he had enciphered the entire message.
Using this method, he could encipher the phrase "How Stuff Works" as "HPY VXZLM EXBVE."
Trimethius' tableau is a good example of a polyalphabetic cipher. Most early ciphers were monoalphabetic,
meaning that one cipher alphabet replaced the plaintext alphabet. A polyalphabetic cipher uses multiple alphabets to
replace the plaintext. Although the same letters are used in each row, the letters of that row have a different meaning.
A cryptographer enciphers a plaintext "A" in row three as a "C," but an "A" in row 23 is a "W." Trimethius' system
therefore uses 26 alphabets -- one for each letter in the normal alphabet.
In the next section, we'll learn how a scholar named Vigenère created a complex polyalphabetic cipher.
The Vigenère Cipher
In the late 1500s, Blaise de Vigenère proposed a polyalphabetic system that is particularly difficult to decipher. His
method used a combination of the Trimethius tableau and a key. The key determined which of the alphabets in the
table the decipherer should use, but wasn't necessarily part of the actual message. Let's look at the Trimethius
tableau again:
Let's assume you are encrypting a message using the key word "CIPHER." You would encipher the first letter using
the "C" row as a guide, using the letter found at the intersection of the "C" row and the corresponding plaintext letter's
column. For the second letter, you'd use the "I" row, and so on. Once you use the "R" row to encipher a letter, you'd
start back at "C". Using this key word and method, you could encipher "How Stuff Works" this way:
Key C I P H E R C I P H E R C
Plain H O W S T U F F W O R K S
Cipher J W L Z X L H N L V V B U

Your enciphered message would read, "JWL ZXLHN LVVBU." If you wanted to write a longer message, you'd keep
repeating the key over and over to encipher your plaintext. The recipient of your message would need to know the
key beforehand in order to decipher the text.
Vigenère suggested an even more complex scheme that used a priming letter followed by the message itself as the
key. The priming letter designated the row the cryptographer first used to begin the message. Both the cryptographer
and the recipient knew which priming letter to use beforehand. This method made cracking ciphers extremely difficult,
but it was also time-consuming, and one error early in the message could garble everything that followed. While the
system was secure, most people found it too complex to use effectively. Here is an example of Vigenère's system --
in this case the priming letter is "D":
Key D H O W S T U F F W O R K
Plain H O W S T U F F W O R K S
Cipher K V K O L N Z K B K F B C

To decipher, the recipient would first look at the first letter of the encrypted message, a "K" in this case, and use the
Trimethius table to find where the "K" fell in the "D" row -- remember, both the cryptographer and recipient know
beforehand that the first letter of the key will always be "D," no matter what the rest of the message says. The letter at
the top of that column is "H." The "H" becomes the next letter in the cipher's key, so the recipient would look at the
"H" row next and find the next letter in the cipher -- a "V" in this case. That would give the recipient an "O." Following
this method, the recipient can decipher the entire message, though it takes some time.
The more complex Vigenère system didn't catch on until the 1800s, but it's still used in modern cipher machines
[source: Kahn].
In the next section, we'll learn about the ADFGX code created by Germany during World War I.
ADFGX Cipher
After the invention of the telegraph, it was now possible for individuals to communicate across entire countries
instantaneously using Morse code. Unfortunately, it was also possible for anyone with the right equipment to wiretap
a line and listen in on exchanges. Moreover, most people had to rely on clerks to encode and decode messages,
making it impossible to send plaintext clandestinely. Once again, ciphers became important.
Germany created a new cipher based on a combination of the Polybius checkerboard and ciphers using key words. It
was known as the ADFGX cipher, because those were the only letters used in the cipher. The Germans chose these
letters because their Morse code equivalents are difficult to confuse, reducing the chance of errors.
The first step was to create a matrix that looked a lot like the Polybius checkerboard:
A D F G X
A A B C D E
D F G H I/J K
F L M N O P
G Q R S T U
X V W X Y Z
Cryptographers would use pairs of cipher letters to represent plaintext letters. The letter's row becomes the first
cipher in the pair, and the column becomes the second cipher. In this example, the enciphered letter "B" becomes
"AD," while "O" becomes "FG." Not all ADFGX matrices had the alphabet plotted in alphabetical order.
Next, the cryptographer would encipher his message. Let's stick with "How Stuff Works." Using this matrix, we'd get
"DFFGXD GFGGGXDADA XDFGGDDXGF."
The next step was to determine a key word, which could be any length but couldn't include any repeated letters. For
this example, we'll use the word DEUTSCH. The cryptographer would create a grid with the key word spelled across
the top. The cryptographer would then write the enciphered message into the grid, splitting the cipher pairs into
individual letters and wrapping around from one row to the next.
D E U T S C H
D F F G X D G
F G G G X D A
D A X D F G G
D D X G F
Next, the cryptographer would rearrange the grid so that the letters of the key word were in alphabetical order,
shifting the letters' corresponding columns accordingly:
C D E H S T U
D D F G X G F
D F G A X G G
G D A G F D X
D D F G X
He would then write out the message by following down each column (disregarding the letters of the key word on the
top row). This message would come out as "DDG DFDD FGAD GAG XXFF GGDG FGXX." It's probably clear why
this code was so challenging -- cryptographers enciphered and transposed every plaintext character. To decode,
you would need to know the key word (DEUTSCH), then you'd work backward from there. You'd start with a grid with
the columns arranged alphabetically. Once you filled it out, you could rearrange the columns properly and use your
matrix to decipher the message.

Words Count
One of the ways you can guess at a key word in an ADFGX cipher
is to count the number of words in the ciphered message. The
number of ciphered words will tell you how long the key word is --
 each ciphered word represents a column of text, and each column
corresponds to a letter in the key word. In our example, there are
seven words in the ciphered message, meaning there are seven
columns with a seven-letter key word. Sure enough, DEUTSCH
has seven letters. Because the ciphered words and the original
message can have different word counts -- seven ciphered words
versus three plaintext words in our example -- deciphering the
message becomes more challenging.
In the next section, we'll look at some of the devices cryptographers have invented to create puzzling ciphers.
Cipher Machines
One of the earliest cipher devices known is the Alberti Disc, invented by Leon Battista Alberti, in the 15th century. The
device consisted of two discs, the inner one containing a scrambled alphabet and the outer one a second, truncated
alphabet and the numbers 1 to 4. The outer disc rotated to match up different letters with the inner circle, which
letters the cryptographer used as plaintext. The outer disc's letters then served as the cipher text.

William West/AFP/Getty Images

Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code" follows the
adventures
of a symbology professor as he solves codes and ciphers,
some
of which he breaks using a Cardano Grille.

Because the inner disc's alphabet was scrambled, the recipient would need an identical copy of the disc the
cryptographer used to decipher the message. To make the system more secure, the cryptographer could change the
disc's alignment in the middle of a message, perhaps after three or four words. The cryptographer and recipient
would know to change the disc settings after a prescribed number of words, perhaps first setting the disc so that the
inner circle "A" matched with the outer circle "W" for the first four words, then with "N" for the next four, and so on.
This made cracking the cipher much more difficult.
In the 19th century, Thomas Jefferson proposed a new ciphering machine. It
was a cylinder of discs mounted on a spindle. On the edge of each disc were Cardano Grilles and
the letters of the alphabet, arranged in random sequence. A cryptographer Steganography
could align the discs to spell out a short message across the cylinder. He would A clever way to hide a secret
then look at another row across the cylinder, which would appear to be
message is in plain sight. One
gibberish, and send that to the recipient. The recipient would use an identical
cylinder to spell out the series of nonsense letters, then scan the rest of the way to do this is to use a
cylinder, looking for a message spelled out in English. In 1922, the United Cardano Grille -- a piece of
States Army adopted a device very similar to Jefferson's; other branches of the paper or cardboard with holes
military soon followed suit [source: Kahn]. cut out of it. To cipher a
Perhaps the most famous ciphering device was Germany's Enigma Machine message, you lay a grille on a
from the early 20th century. The Enigma Machine resembled a typewriter, but blank sheet of paper and write
instead of letter keys it had a series of lights with a letter stamped on each. out your message through the
Pressing a key caused an electric current to run through a complex system of grille's holes. You fill the rest of
wires and gears, resulting in a ciphered letter illuminating. For instance, you the paper with innocent text.
might press the key for the letter "A" and see "T" light up. When your recipient receives
What made the Enigma Machine such a formidable ciphering device was that the message, he lays an
once you pressed a letter, a rotor in the machine would turn, changing the identical grille over it to see the
electrode contact points inside the machine. This means if you pressed "A" a secret text. This is a form of
second time, a different letter would light up instead of "T." Each time you steganography, hiding a
typed a letter, the rotor turned, and after a certain number of letters, a second
message within something else.
rotor engaged, then a third. The machine allowed the operator to switch how
letters fed into the machine, so that when you pressed one letter, the machine
would interpret it as if you had pressed a different letter.
How does a cryptanalyst crack such a difficult code? In the next section, we'll
learn how codes and ciphers are broken.

Photo Courtesy U.S. Army

German soliders using an
Enigma Machine in the field.
Cryptanalysis
While there are hundreds of different codes and cipher systems in the world, there are some universal traits and
techniques cryptanalysts use to solve them. Patience and perseverance are two of the most important qualities in a
cryptanalyst. Solving a cipher can take a lot of time, sometimes requiring you to retrace your steps or start over. It is
tempting to give up when you are faced with a particuarly challenging cipher.
Another important skill to have is a strong familiarity with the language in which the plaintext is written. Trying to solve
a coded message written in an unfamiliar language is almost impossible.

Navajo Code Talkers

During World War II, the United States employed Navajo Native
Americans to encode messages. The Navajos used a code
system based on how their language translated into English. They
assigned terms like "airplane" to code words such as "Da-he-tih-
hi," which means "Hummingbird." To encipher words that didn't
have a corresponding code word, they used an encoded alphabet.
This encoded alphabet used Navajo translations of English words
to represent letters; for instance, the Navajo word "wol-la-chee"
meant "ant," so "wol-la-chee" could stand for the letter "a." Some
letters were represented by multiple Navajo words. The Navajo
language was so foreign to the Japanese, they never broke the
code [source: Kahn].
A strong familiarity with a language includes a grasp of the language's redundancy.
Redundancy means that every language contains more characters or words than are actually needed to convey
information. The rules of the English language create redundancy -- for example, no English word will begin with the
letters "ng." English also relies heavily on a small number of words. Words like "the," "of," "and," "to," "a," "in," "that,"
"it," "is," and "I" account for more than one quarter of the text of an average message written in English [source:
Kahn].
Knowing the redundant qualities of a language makes a cryptanalyst's task much easier. No matter how convoluted
the cipher is, it follows some language's rules in order for the recipient to understand the message. Cryptanalysts look
for patterns within ciphers to find common words and letter pairings.
One basic technique in cryptanalysis is frequency analysis. Every language uses certain letters more often than
others. In English, the letter "e" is the most common letter. By counting up the characters in a text, a cryptanalyst can
see very quickly what sort of cipher he has. If the distribution of cipher frequency is similar to the distribution of the
frequency of a normal alphabet, the cryptanalyst may conclude that he's dealing with a monoalphabetic cipher.

©HowStuffWorks 2007
This chart shows the frequency with which
 each letter in the English language is used.

In the next section, we'll look at more complex cryptanalysis and the role luck plays in breaking a cipher.
Tricks of the Trade
Cryptographers use many methods to confuse cryptanalysts.
Acrophony is a method that encodes a letter by using a word that
starts with that letter's sound. "Bat" might stand for "b," while
"cunning" could stand for "k." A polyphone is a symbol that
represents more than one letter of plaintext -- a "%" might
represent both an "r" and a "j" for example, whereas homophonic
substitution uses different ciphers to represent the same
plaintext letter -- "%" and "&" could both represent the letter "c."
Some cryptographers even throw in null symbols that don't mean
anything at all.
Breaking the Code
More complicated ciphers require a combination of experience, experimentation and the occasional shot-in-the-dark
guess. The most difficult ciphers are short, continuous blocks of characters. If the cryptographer's message includes
word breaks, spaces between each enciphered word, it makes deciphering much easier. The cryptanalyst looks for
groups of repeated ciphers, analyze where those groups of letters fall within the context of words and make guesses
at what those letters might mean. If the cryptanalyst has a clue about the message's content, he might look for certain
words. A cryptanalyst intercepting a message from a Navy captain to command might look for terms referring to
weather patterns or sea conditions. If he guesses that "hyuwna" means "stormy," he might be able to crack the rest of
the cipher.
Many polyalphabetic ciphers rely on key words, which makes the message
vulnerable. If the cryptanalyst correctly guesses the right key word, he can
quickly decipher the entire message. It's important for cryptographers to
change key words frequently and to use uncommon or nonsense key words.
Remembering a nonsense key word can be challenging, and if you make your
cipher system so difficult that your recipient can't decipher the message
quickly, your communication system fails.
Cryptanalysts take advantage of any opportunity to solve a cipher. If the
cryptographer used a ciphering device, a savvy cryptanalyst will try to get the
same device or make one based on his theories of the cryptographer's
methodology. During World War II, Polish cryptanalysts obtained an Enigma
Machine and were close to figuring out Germany's ciphering system when it
became too dangerous to continue. The Polish exchanged their information
and technology with the Allies, who created their own Enigma Machines and
deciphered many of Germany's coded messages.
Modern high-level encryption methods rely on mathematical processes that
are relatively simple to create, but extremely difficult to decipher. Public-key
encryption is a good example. It uses two keys -- one for encoding a
message and another for decoding. The encoding key is the public key,
available to whomever wants to communicate with the holder of the secret
key. The secret key decodes messages encrypted by the public key and vice
versa. For more information on public-key encryption, see How Encryption Christopher Furlong/ Getty Images
Works. Breaking the code carved into
The complex algorithms cryptographers use ensure secrecy for now. That will the ceiling of the Rosslyn
change if quantum computing becomes a reality. Quantum computers could Chapel in Scotland reveals a
find the factors of a large number much faster than a classic computer. If series of musical passages.
engineers build a reliable quantum computer, practically every encrypted
message on the Internet will be vulnerable. To learn more about how cryptographers plan to deal with problem, read
How Quantum Encryption Works.
In the next section, we'll look at some codes and ciphers that remain unsolved, much to cryptanalysts' chagrin.
Famous Unsolved Codes
While most cryptanalysts will tell you that, theoretically, there's no such thing as an unbreakable code, a few
cryptographers have created codes and ciphers that no one has managed to crack. In most cases, there's just not
enough text in the message for cryptanalysts to analyze. Sometimes, the cryptographer's system is too complex, or
there may be no message at all -- the codes and ciphers could be hoaxes.
In the 1800s, a pamphlet with three encrypted messages began to show up in a small community in Virginia. The
pamphlet described the adventures of a man named Beale who'd struck it rich panning for gold. Reportedly, Beale
had hidden most of his wealth in a secret location and left a coded message leading to the treasure's location with an
innkeeper. Twenty years passed with no word from Beale, and the innkeeper sought out help solving the coded
messages. Eventually, someone determined that one of the messages used the Declaration of Independence as a
code book, but the deciphered message only gave vague hints at the location of the treasure and claimed that the
other messages would lead directly to it. No one has solved either of the other messages, and many believe the
whole thing to be a hoax.
In the mid 1960s, residents of San Francisco and surrounding counties were
terrified of a vicious killer who taunted police with coded messages. The killer
called himself the Zodiac and sent most of his letters to San Francisco
newspapers, occasionally dividing up one long ciphered message between
three papers. Allegedly, the ciphers perplexed law enforcement and
intelligence agencies, though amateur cryptanalysts managed to crack most of
them. There are a few messages that have never been solved, some
supposedly a clue to the killer's identity. The Zodiac killer sent ciphered
Richard Feynman, physicist and pioneer in the field of nanotechnology, messages like this one to
received three encoded messages from a scientist at Los Alamos and shared San Francisco newspapers
them with his graduate students when he couldn't decipher them himself. in the 1960s.
Currently, they are posted on a puzzle site. Cryptanalysts have only managed
to decipher the first message, which turned out to be the opening lines of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" written in
Middle English.
In 1990, Jim Sanborn created a sculpture called Kryptos for the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Kryptos contains
four enciphered messages, but cryptanalysts have solved only three. The final message has very few characters
(either 97 or 98, depending on whether one character truly belongs to the fourth message), making it very difficult to
analyze. Several people and organizations have boasted about solving the other three messages, including the CIA
and the NSA.
While these messages along with many others are unsolved today, there's no reason to believe they will remain
unsolved forever. For more than 100 years, a ciphered message written by Edgar Allen Poe went unsolved, puzzling
professional and amateur cryptanalysts. But in 2000, a man named Gil Broza cracked the cipher. He found that the
cipher used multiple homophonic substitutions -- Poe had used 14 ciphers to represent the letter "e" -- as well as
several mistakes. Broza's work proves that just because a code hasn't been solved doesn't mean it's not solvable
[source: Elonka.com].

You're the Cryptanalyst

The following message is enciphered text using a method similar
to one discussed in this article. There are clues in the article that
can help you solve the cipher. It might take you a while to find a
method that works, but with a little patience you'll figure it out.
Good luck!
KWKWKKRWRKKKKKWRSRWWO
SWWSWORSSRWOROSROKSKWK
OKOKWSOWRSSORWRKWOWKR
KSRKRWKWRWSWRROWRSOKS
KSRSWRKKOOWOOOKSOKKRS
RWRWSWROSKKWRWKKSWKSS
RWOORWRWWSWSSKWSWOWRK
SWSWKWKOKKORKROWSKRRK
WSWWWKWOOROWSKRKSKOWW
Highlight below with your mouse to see the answer:
You have deciphered a code based on the ADFGX cipher used by
Germany in World War I. The key word was Discovery.