The Vatican’s archives include hundreds of manuscripts that are encrypted
Vatican Apostolic Archive
BEATA MEGYESI strode previous the Pontifical Swiss Guards, of their Renaissance-era uniforms. She was headed not for the Sistine Chapel or St Peter’s Basilica, however the Vatican’s archives. Precious few folks are allowed into this legendary assortment of paperwork and letters spanning 12 centuries. Yet even in that context, Megyesi’s 2012 go to was unusually intriguing. She was right here to see texts so secret that no residing particular person, not even the pope, may inform you what they include.
Megyesi, a linguist based mostly at Uppsala University in Sweden on the time, had travelled to the Vatican to pore over a tranche of papers written in elaborate ciphers – the key codes utilized by spymasters and others keen to ship personal messages. An skilled in cracking historical codes, she had been invited after breaking the infamous Copiale cipher.
Megyesi had the chance to use the Vatican’s encrypted papers for a challenge with an audacious objective: to absolutely automate the method of decrypting historical ciphers in order that many hundreds of in any other case inaccessible letters may lastly converse to us from down the centuries. “The dream is to be able to point your phone camera at a cipher and read it immediately,” she says.
In the last decade since, Megyesi and her colleagues have developed software program that expedites their painstaking cryptanalysis – and researchers related to the challenge have notched some exceptional successes. These embody the current decryption of a very fiendish code employed by a Seventeenth-century French nobleman and, most sensationally, the cipher encrypting letters written by …