Can a Computer Crack the Beale Ciphers?

[Jaziel]

(Please excuse me if this is the wrong section to ask this question) With reference to 'The Code Book' by Simon Singh, will it be possible for a computer to crack the as yet still undeciphered first and third (alleged) ciphers of the famous Beale Ciphers? If so, how might this be achieved? Many thanks.

 

[jedishrfu]

I believe they can't be deciphered until the right edition of the code book on which they based is found.

Nowadays, we have a lot of old books that are digitized so i suppose an algorithm could be designed to test each book against the two texts to see if we get something understandable.

 

[Baluncore]

... will it be possible for a computer to crack the as yet still undeciphered first and third (alleged) ciphers of the famous Beale Ciphers?

It is still possible, but it will depend on the length of the key employed to generate the transformation. A computer may convolve the cipher text into several different plausible texts, without giving any indication if the original is actually included in the set.

In order to be productive, a cryptanalyst should balance their work on several ciphers at the one time. That way there will be some success, even if some ciphers have insufficient depth, or are deliberate hoaxes. It is not unusual to find faked ciphers, designed to waste the time of otherwise competent cryptanalysts, or to make money selling dreams of great treasure.

Nowadays, we have a lot of old books that are digitized so i suppose an algorithm could be designed to test each book against the two texts to see if we get something understandable.

The digitisation of books is not helpful if the page, line, word spelling, ligatures and hyphenation is not preserved. The order of digitised blocks of text are not preserved in common digitised file formats, and there are often invisible errors in OCR and the distribution of spaces, that confound the use of what otherwise appears to be a true facsimile.

 

[jedishrfu]

The Beale cipher is a form of book cipher. The encoder numbered the words in a document and when he needed the word he'd write down its number.

THE BOOK
1-The 2-quick 3-brown 4-fox 5-jumped 6-over 7-my 8-lazy 9-dog.

THE CIPHER
so if I wrote 7 8 9 5 6 1 3 4 you could decode it as:

THE ANSWER
My lazy dog jumped over the brown fox.

Basically you need to know the basis text document as standard statistical based cryptoanalytics won't work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beale_ciphers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beale_ciphers
There is also a belief that the ciphers are a hoax perpetrated to sell the pamphlets that advertised them.

 

[Jaziel]

It has been pointed out that even if the Beale papers are a hoax, the two undeciphered ciphers themselves could still be genuine ciphers. There's no treasure at the end of the day, that's all. A possible alternative, mentioned by Simon Singh (I think?) is that the Beale papers are genuine and that Thomas Beale deliberately scrambled parts of the two ciphers for added security.

It is still possible, but it will depend on the length of the key employed to generate the transformation.

That is very interesting. Just how short can the keytext of a book cipher be without risking quick decryption?