The pigpen cipher (alternatively referred to as the masonic cipher, Freemason's cipher, Rosicrucian cipher, Napoleon cipher, and tic-tac-toe cipher) [2] [3] is a geometric simple substitution cipher, which exchanges letters for symbols which are fragments of a grid. The example key shows one way the letters can be assigned to the grid.
The Pigpen cipher offers little cryptographic security. It differentiates itself from other simple monoalphabetic substitution ciphers solely by its use of symbols rather than letters, the use of which fails to assist in curbing cryptanalysis. Additionally, the prominence and recognizability of the Pigpen leads to it being arguably worthless from a security standpoint. Knowledge of Pigpen is so ubiquitous that an interceptor might not need to actually break this cipher at all, but merely decipher it, in the same way that the intended recipient would.
Due to Pigpen's simplicity, it is very often included in children's books on ciphers and secret writing. [4]
The cipher is believed to be an ancient cipher [5] [6] and is said to have originated with the Hebrew rabbis. [7] [8] Thompson writes that, “there is evidence that suggests that the Knights Templar utilized a pig-pen cipher” during the Christian Crusades. [9] [10]
Parrangan & Parrangan write that it was used by an individual, who may have been a Mason, “in the 16th century to save his personal notes.” [11]
In 1531 Cornelius Agrippa described an early form of the Rosicrucian cipher, which he attributes to an existing Jewish Kabbalistic tradition. [12] This system, called "The Kabbalah of the Nine Chambers" by later authors, used the Hebrew alphabet rather than the Latin alphabet, and was used for religious symbolism rather than for any apparent cryptological purpose. [13]
On the 7th July 1730, a French Pirate named Olivier Levasseur threw out a scrap of paper written in the pigpen cipher, allegedly containing the whereabouts of his treasure which was never found but is speculated to be located in Seychelles. The exact configuration of the cipher has also not been determined, an example of using different letters in different sections to further complicate the cipher from its standard configuration.
Variations of this cipher were used by both the Rosicrucian brotherhood [14] and the Freemasons, though the latter used the pigpen cipher so often that the system is frequently called the Freemason's cipher. Hysin claims it was invented by Freemasons. [15] They began using it in the early 18th century to keep their records of history and rites private, and for correspondence between lodge leaders. [3] [16] [17] Tombstones of Freemasons can also be found which use the system as part of the engravings. One of the earliest stones in Trinity Church Cemetery in New York City, which opened in 1697, contains a cipher of this type which deciphers to "Remember death" (cf. "memento mori").
George Washington's army had documentation about the system, with a much more randomized form of the alphabet. During the American Civil War, the system was used by Union prisoners in Confederate prisons. [14]
Using the Pigpen cipher key shown in the example above, the message "X marks the spot " is rendered in ciphertext as
The core elements of this system are the grid and dots. Some systems use the X's, but even these can be rearranged. One commonly used method orders the symbols as shown in the above image: grid, grid, X, X. Another commonly used system orders the symbols as grid, X, grid, X. Another is grid, grid, grid, with each cell having a letter of the alphabet, and the last one having an "&" character. Letters from the first grid have no dot, letters from the second each have one dot, and letters from the third each have two dots. Another variation of this last one is called the Newark Cipher, which instead of dots uses one to three short lines which may be projecting in any length or orientation. This gives the illusion of a larger number of different characters than actually exist. [18]
Another system, used by the Rosicrucians in the 17th century, used a single grid of nine cells, and 1 to 3 dots in each cell or "pen". So ABC would be in the top left pen, followed by DEF and GHI on the first line, then groups of JKL MNO PQR on the second, and STU VWX YZ on the third. [2] [14] When enciphered, the location of the dot in each symbol (left, center, or right), would indicate which letter in that pen was represented. [1] [14] More difficult systems use a non-standard form of the alphabet, such as writing it backwards in the grid, up and down in the columns, [4] or a completely randomized set of letters.
The Templar cipher is a method claimed to have been used by the Knights Templar and uses a variant of a Maltese Cross. [19] This is likely a cipher used by the Neo-Templars (Freemasons) of the 18th century, and not that of the religious order of the Knights Templar from the 12th-14th centuries during the Crusades. [20] Some websites showing the Knights Templar cipher deviate from the original order of letters. Based on the Freemasons Document, [21] the 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th crosses assign the letters in clock-wise order starting at the top, the 2nd cross assigns the letters in a left, right, top, bottom order while the final cross assigns the letters in a bottom, top, right left order.
The Club Penguin Code, [22] also known as the Tic-Tac-Toe code, [22] the PSA cipher, and the EPF cipher, is a cipher created by online composer and artist Chris Hendricks (known online as Screenhog) for the online game Club Penguin. Designed for use by the in-universe group Elite Penguin Force, (EPF, formerly known as Penguin Secret Agency, or PSA) the cipher leans more heavily into the style of Tic-Tac-Toe. It is represented with three grids, which each represent nine letters of the alphabet arranged left to right, top to bottom; one blank, for letters A-I, one with the letter X in each space, for letters J-R, and one with the letter O in each space, for letters S-Z, plus an additional character. This last character is used as a signature for the in-universe leader of the EPF, known as the Director.
The need for a unique code came from Hendricks wishing to distance Club Penguin related materials from anything regarding Freemason or New World Order conspiracy theories. He said in a video uploaded to his YouTube channel: [23]
I just didn't want Club Penguin being associated in videos like "So, Club Penguin, right? 'Fun and safe virtual world for kids?' I guess they forgot to put mind control in their advertisements! I have hard-hitting exclusive proof that Club Penguin is using the exact same code that the Illuminati use!" [...] Now, I grant you, the odds of a video like that actually gaining any traction is pretty slim, but would you take that chance? I didn't. I instead looked at the code and said "This looks a lot like Tic-Tac-Toe! What if we just copied it three times, kept the first one blank, the second one with X's, and the third one with O's? That's twenty-seven spaces. It'll cover the whole alphabet and give us something unique that's not conspiracy theory friendly." So that's what we did, and that was that.
In cryptography, a cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. To encipher or encode is to convert information into cipher or code. In common parlance, "cipher" is synonymous with "code", as they are both a set of steps that encrypt a message; however, the concepts are distinct in cryptography, especially classical cryptography.
Cryptanalysis refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic security systems and gain access to the contents of encrypted messages, even if the cryptographic key is unknown.
Tic-tac-toe, noughts and crosses, or Xs and Os is a paper-and-pencil game for two players who take turns marking the spaces in a three-by-three grid with X or O. The player who succeeds in placing three of their marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row is the winner. It is a solved game, with a forced draw assuming best play from both players.
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, pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth. The receiver deciphers the text by performing the inverse substitution process to extract the original message.
In cryptography, a transposition cipher is a method of encryption which scrambles the positions of characters (transposition) without changing the characters themselves. Transposition ciphers reorder units of plaintext according to a regular system to produce a ciphertext which is a permutation of the plaintext. They differ from substitution ciphers, which do not change the position of units of plaintext but instead change the units themselves. Despite the difference between transposition and substitution operations, they are often combined, as in historical ciphers like the ADFGVX cipher or complex high-quality encryption methods like the modern Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
In cryptography, a Caesar cipher, also known as Caesar's cipher, the shift cipher, Caesar's code, or Caesar shift, is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. For example, with a left shift of 3, D would be replaced by A, E would become B, and so on. The method is named after Julius Caesar, who used it in his private correspondence.
The Vigenère cipher is a method of encrypting alphabetic text where each letter of the plaintext is encoded with a different Caesar cipher, whose increment is determined by the corresponding letter of another text, the key.
In cryptography, a rotor machine is an electro-mechanical stream cipher device used for encrypting and decrypting messages. Rotor machines were the cryptographic state-of-the-art for much of the 20th century; they were in widespread use from the 1920s to the 1970s. The most famous example is the German Enigma machine, the output of which was deciphered by the Allies during World War II, producing intelligence code-named Ultra.
A straddling checkerboard is a device for converting an alphanumeric plaintext into digits whilst simultaneously achieving fractionation and data compression relative to other schemes using digits. It also is known as a monôme-binôme cipher.
The Dorabella Cipher is an enciphered letter written by composer Edward Elgar to Dora Penny, which was accompanied by another dated July 14, 1897. Penny never deciphered it and its meaning remains unknown.
In cryptography, the ADFGVX cipher was a manually applied field cipher used by the Imperial German Army during World War I. It was used to transmit messages secretly using wireless telegraphy. ADFGVX was in fact an extension of an earlier cipher called ADFGX which was first used on 1 March 1918 on the German Western Front. ADFGVX was applied from 1 June 1918 on both the Western Front and Eastern Front.
The Polybius square, also known as the Polybius checkerboard, is a device invented by the ancient Greeks Cleoxenus and Democleitus, and made famous by the historian and scholar Polybius. The device is used for fractionating plaintext characters so that they can be represented by a smaller set of symbols, which is useful for telegraphy, steganography, and cryptography. The device was originally used for fire signalling, allowing for the coded transmission of any message, not just a finite number of predetermined options as was the convention before.
"The Alphabet Cipher" was a brief study published by Lewis Carroll in 1868, describing how to use the alphabet to send encrypted codes. It was one of four ciphers he invented between 1858 and 1868, and one of two polyalphabetic ciphers he devised during that period and used to write letters to his friends.
In cryptography, a classical cipher is a type of cipher that was used historically but for the most part, has fallen into disuse. In contrast to modern cryptographic algorithms, most classical ciphers can be practically computed and solved by hand. However, they are also usually very simple to break with modern technology. The term includes the simple systems used since Greek and Roman times, the elaborate Renaissance ciphers, World War II cryptography such as the Enigma machine and beyond.
Christopher L. Hodapp is an American author and filmmaker, noted for his writings about Freemasonry, fraternalism, the Knights Templar, secret societies and conspiracy theories. He is the founding editor in chief of the Journal of The Masonic Society, the associate director of the Masonic Library and Museum of Indiana, and public relations director for the Grand Lodge of Indiana.
BATCO, short for Battle Code, is a hand-held, paper-based encryption system used at a low, front line level in the British Army. It was introduced along with the Clansman combat net radio in the early 1980s and was largely obsolete by 2010 due to the wide deployment of the secure Bowman radios. BATCO consists of a code, contained on a set of vocabulary cards, and cipher sheets for superencryption of the numeric code words. The cipher sheets, which are typically changed daily, also include an authentication table and a radio call sign protection system.
The Copiale cipher is an encrypted manuscript consisting of 75,000 handwritten characters filling 105 pages in a bound volume. Undeciphered for more than 260 years, the document was decrypted in 2011 with computer assistance. An international team consisting of Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute and Viterbi School of Engineering, along with Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden, found the cipher to be an encrypted German text. The manuscript is a homophonic cipher that uses a complex substitution code, including symbols and letters, for its text and spaces.
General der Nachrichtenaufklärung Training Referat was the training organization within the General der Nachrichtenaufklärung (GDNA), the military signals intelligence agency of the Wehrmacht during World War II. Initially established from May 1941, it continued teaching until September 1944. Until 1942, the work of the Training Referat was not fully exploited and only a small beginners course was taught.
Unsolved! The History and Mystery of the World’s Greatest Ciphers from Ancient Egypt to Online Secret Societies is a 2017 book by American mathematician and cryptologist Craig P. Bauer. The book explores the history and challenges of various unsolved ciphers, ranging from ancient scripts to modern codes and puzzles. The book also invites readers to try their hand at cracking the ciphers, offering clues and hints along the way. The book received positive reviews from critics and readers, who praised its engaging style, comprehensive coverage, and intriguing content.
The Aristocrat Cipher is a type of monoalphabetic substitution cipher in which plaintext is replaced with ciphertext and encoded into assorted letters, numbers, and symbols based on a keyword. The formatting of these ciphers generally includes a title, letter frequency, keyword indicators, and the encoder's nom de plume. The predecessor to these ciphers stems from the Caesar Cipher around 100. The Aristocrat Cipher also used a transposition of letters to encrypt a message.
