Tales From the Crypt—ology

[Music] you are here for a stroll in the cryptology and we're going to talk about some some some crypto mysteries that have yet to be solved my name is Tiberius Heflin and you can catch me on what a Tiberias on Twitter and if you feel like tweeting about this event go ahead I love being able to Storify my my talks so tweet away I good bad the ugly level um I am I am a well I'm in flux at the moment I'm just moving to to Intel to do security assessments of open source projects and my background I went to university and studied digital forensics ethical hacking and computer security in general so I have a good

grounding in a couple of different disciplines I'm currently based in Portland Oregon and however you may notice I've got a bit of a twang I grew up and spent a lot of time in Scotland so let's go ahead and get started and in the talk today we're going to talk a little bit about what cryptography is what we're going to talk about the mysteries that of the unsolved ciphers for the Zodiac killer the bill ciphers and The Voice manuscript and then we're going to talk about some of the open source software that's being developed to try and solve some of these age-old mysteries first up I want to talk about what cryptology is and when I

was researching this talk I found that there were a lot of a lot of theories and confusion surrounding what cryptography otology and crypto analysts analysts how those three words kind of interact and what they mean some people think that they're interchangeable some people who break them up into history statistics and linguistics for the purpose of this talk I'm going to use the definitions as per the book modern Krypton out crypt analysis by Christopher Swenson and we're going to look at cryptography as encrypting and decrypting the code crypto analysts and analysis really sorry I'm never going to quite get that word right I always stumble on it as breaking the code and we're going to look at crystal we're

going to use the word cryptology to describe the study of both also for the sake of clarity I just want to throw up some definitions for those among us who may be new to this topic being a security conference that's kind of open to the public you never really know the types of people that you're going to get so onto our first mystery that of the Zodiac killer is ciphers and if you're not familiar the Zodiac killer was active in Northern California from the late 60s to the early 70s he claimed during that period that he murdered 37 victims but only seven were ever confirmed and two of those people survived their attack now there was

never enough evidence to bring a case against anyone though there were several suspects this particular killer is of interest to Crypt Allah to Christology because he would send letters to local newspapers for publication in order to taunt the police these messages included cipher text messages and only one of which was ever solved now newspapers normally wouldn't publish these kinds of messages from known serial killers but at the time when he sent these in he would send them with a plain text message threatening to do addition or additional attacks if they weren't published and so in kind of working with the police it decided that it was best for Public Safety to go ahead and publish them one of the really

interesting things about this case is that none of the messages used the same cipher and they're all different which is why some of them still have may been sold and now the cipher text messages haven't been named they referred to simply by the number of characters that there are in East message and extras here is 408 and that was sent in three parts to three different newspapers it was actually the only message that was sold and it was solved by a high school teacher and his wife now in this talk I haven't actually shown the plain text message of what was just decoded something because it's really obscene and could be triggering the cipher was a

homophonic substitution cipher and rather than a one-for-one cipher the Zodiac killer actually as you can see here use several symbol to represent one word or one character so though the last eighteen symbols don't follow this pattern and were not able to be decoded along with the rest of the message it's thought that these 18 symbols were actually filler to make sure that all three newspapers had the same amount of text just to make it a little bit harder to figure out the code in regards to the last 18 symbols attempts have been made to anagram the text in in plain text according to the decipher that solved the rest of the the rest of the message

however there 700 series yes seven hundred and forty billion ways to anagram an 18 letter string and there haven't been any successful attempts to really make sense of it I mean they have come out they have been able to find words in it but not anything that would make sense contextually interesting to note that the rotation of symbols that was used with to code the message is actually consistent until the last 18 letters which lends credence to the filler explanation and the appears to maybe either had been a bad speller or struggled to follow that our own cipher key as their spelling errors throughout the text and errors almost always seem to be where the symbols that

he's that they chosen for letters are very similar such as most and most where the a is a filled in triangle and the symbol for asses a triangle with a dot inside it pictured here is 340 this was sent to authorities on November 8th 1969 it is so unsolved there's a number of notable differences between 340 and 408 the most obvious being that the message is 30 or sorry sixty eight characters shorter giving less to analyze and that the in regards to dissemble themselves seven symbols have been removed from the symbols that were used in 408 and sixteen new symbols added adding to the complexity and making pattern identification far harder so that seems to be the ones that hold the most

promise in regards to finding an actual solution pictured here is 32 and it's unsolved postmarked June 1970 it was accompanied as you can see by a plaintext message saying that the cipher text would reveal the location of a bomb which was time to go off but the code was never broken the bomb was never found and the cipher has 32 symbols in it in total 28 of which are unique making animal analysis pretty much impossible it is essentially a one-time pad here we have 13 and that was postmarked April 20 1970 and it has the same problems as 32 it's too short and eight of the 13 symbols are entirely unique it's not thought that 32

and 13 will ever be solvable due to this so next up on our tour of unsolved crypto mysteries we have the Beale papers these are really interesting in that they originated from a 1885 leaflet claiming in that in 1820 a man named Thomas Beale buried treasure somewhere in Bedford County Virginia and then he supposedly entrusted the ciphertext within a box to an innkeeper who held on to these and supposedly Thomas Beale just disappeared afterward I would guess something like a hobbit with a ring never to be heard from again the treasure is estimated currently in today to be worth over 43 million dollars and the ciphertext but the whole the papers comprised of three cipher

text pages supposedly the first reveals location the second reveals the content and the third reveals who the owner is or their next of kin now there's a lot of questions surrounding this hill and some people think that perhaps it's a little bit made-up part of that is because supposedly the end keeper waited 23 years before ever even opening the box and then he did nothing with the content for three decades until he feeds them to a friend on his deathbed which seems a little questionable I mean I certainly know that if somebody gave me a box and then disappeared I'd want to know what was in it and now it's claimed that this unnamed friend spent 20 years

trying to solve the riddle and he actually succeeded in solving text 2 pictured here which reveals the content of the treasure to be gold silver and jewels the key that he used to solve this was the Declaration of Independence with a couple of modifications how we figured out how to do this little mystery he left no note documentation as to how he Thomas the other two ciphers however have proved far harder as today there have been no recorded successful descriptions although a gentleman in early early 2000 I think claimed to have solved them however he later died and did not leave any information as to how he did so many people believe that they cannot be solved and that they're just a

hoax and a popular theory describes them as a miasma sonic fiction and an allegory for the parable of the secret vote I'm not really up with my a sonic history so I'm not entirely sure without me and then our last stop on this world whirlwind tour and I don't know if I've need to gone through this all a little bit quick but we'll get through it is the Voynich manuscript this is probably my favorite mystery I I find it fascinating so we can talk a lot about it if you want and now this here is a page from the Voynich manuscript and it's a 240 page book that contains pictures of animals and plants that are

not familiar to any place on earth and and text which does not look anything like any known language it's been named after William William Wilfrid Voynich who acquired the text in 19 2012 when he acquired the library the contents of a library from college now the document has actually been attributed to a number of authors it's been posited that front that Roger Bacon offends this entire Albertus Magnus a German Dominican friar John Dee and English philosopher and Edward Carrie Kelly a spirit medium who worked with John Dee have all been suggested as the author it's really interesting a lot of the kind of earlier research on it they've tried to suss out that it was a fake and

who faked it and the carbon dating has actually ruled out John Dee and Edward Kelly as authors and some and some even though some suggests that Voynich himself manufactured the document that has also been ruled out by carbon dating other people have suggested that the manuscript is the work of a Raphael mr. kasky I'm sorry if I mispronounced that who was a cryptographer in at the time who claimed to have created an uncrackable cipher and that it's suggested that this document with his creation in order to prove that this cipher was on uncrackable there are other theories as to the origin of the document and some are more outlandish than others aliens bevies it's been very widely

questioned as to where it came from the illustrations of seen here may provide some kind of clue as to where originated from this particular this picture in particular depicts a castle that has Swallowtail clinician's which are on a castle you have kind of sometimes you have these these kind of patterns on top of the castle to protect archers from arrow fire when they're shooting down at the enemy and this particular style is common to Verona Italy so it's been suggested that that might indicate where the person who drew them came from how for analysis of the images within the document have yet to be carried out so we're still not really sure and that's going to we really don't know anything

about the document so a lot of this is very inconclusive and the language that is used in the document throughout it is part of the mystery pointed cheese as it's known is an unknown script and the whole book comprises over 170,000 characters now there are 2225 distinct symbols depending on who you speak to and how they interpret that the text runs left to right with no obvious punctuation no air Corrections appear throughout the document and the flow of writing is very smooth giving the impression that the text was not encoded and that the person was able to just fluently write as per their train of thought it appears to follow language convention certain symbols appear to

have to appear in certain word just like vowels and English you also have symbols that must appear before or after other symbols some like almost like our kind of english rules of I before E except after scenes and so on however one oddity is that there there appear to be very few words with less than 10 characters there are many theories surrounding how to go about deciphering this and what what the method was used to say fit the letter based cipher theory holds that the menu script is meaningful in some language just not one that's known and that it's been intentionally hidden using letter mapping to nonsensical character symbols we do have a problem with the theory in

that the letter distribution does not limit resemble any known language now there's additionally the codebook cipher theory which just that the word in the book are actually to be referenced against a separate cipher book in order to decode them however this kind of cipher is normally used for short messages due to the awkward nature of needing an additional document that has to be kept up-to-date for the reader and the writer and we have another theory that claims the text is actually entirely meaningless and that the however it contains details with hidden meetings an example that the message is actually the second letter of every forecourt and if you were to systematically map that out you would then be able to decode it

however said trying to find a solution for this type of cipher would be like looking at a needle in a haystack because you have no way of knowing if it the first first word or the first letter in every fourth word or the fourth word and every 10 10 letters it's it would be very difficult and time-consuming to define to try each one and see what you do the natural language theory to my is is that the text represents a little-known natural spoken language written in an invented alphabet where tonal patterns are of important it could be the work of a missionary who's trying to make sense of a language a new language that they've encountered the

main argument is that statistical properties of the text are roughly consistent with Chinese and Vietnamese and further support of this this hypothesis is that the text appears to break the Year up into 360 days in groupings of 15 days which is how the Chinese calendar breaks up the year there's there's a lot around the manuscript to be considered and there is a gentleman in Britain who claims to have deciphered part of it however I don't know that this has been peer-reviewed yet and so I haven't really wanted to include that but it's certainly something that if you're interested in the document I would certainly recommend looking into that there are many other unsolved ciphers which you can research

if the area interests you I would highly recommend it it's a really fun kind of way to keep your mind in the security game but still get some kind of enjoyment out of it there's there's something to be said for working on an unsolvable puzzle and there are some really interesting tools that are coming out of the amateur effort to solve these mysteries through the Voynich manuscript we have the Voynich reader which allows digital browsing of the documents and it allows you to perform a string searches and it also has some interesting statistical generation facilities which i've not explored yet but seem like a really interesting a way to to try and solve the manuscript and there's also

dkd crypto and this to do this was actually originally created in order to solve these idiot killers message 340 however is really been built on quite a lot and it should be able to solve homophonic and monophonic ciphers so it's an interesting tool to play around with and I would highly recommend it if you're looking into any of these mysteries that you is a good go-to tool to start playing around with they can solve the 408 message on its own with very little interference there's also a Christmas crypto scope which is tool for computing statistics and searching for patterns and substitution ciphers or strikes or texts sorry and there's crypto cracker which is a freeware that can solve over 45

different classical cipher types and in many cases without being fed any plain text or to use as a key which is really quite an advancement then there is also a sarasu which is kind of just a bit of fun it can actually be used to procedurally generate code text based off the void or not code text just text based on the Voynich manuscript to be really useful if you want to provide some props to your PNG group so I'm afraid that I've maybe gone through that all a little bit quickly or underestimate is how long it would take me once I got up on the stage but I really want to say thank you for

your attention and you've been great and does anybody have any questions um I don't know that there's a solid answer to that it's just that there's I feel like I should have an answer for this and it's completely gone out of my mind there you go thank you anybody else great thank you very much for your attention [Applause]