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Throughout human history, the desire to communicate in secret has driven some of the most brilliant minds to create increasingly complex systems of hidden language. Generals encoded battle plans, ...

The theory that statesman and scientist Francis Bacon was the ghostwriter behind Shakespeare, and embedded the Bard's plays with ciphers, had a major influence on modern cryptography. William F.

A coded letter sent on Napoleon Bonaparte's orders in March 1809 has finally been read, 217 years after it was written. The ...

Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician, first learned of the Zodiac Killer’s unsolved ciphers — a series of encrypted messages — from a documentary in the 1990s. His interest marginally increased in ...

FORT HUACHUCA, Ariz. -- When Ralph Van Deman established the War Department's intelligence organization shortly after the United States entered World War I, he was faced with the daunting task of ...

Edward Hebern of California designed this machine to encipher and decipher typed messages. It uses one of the most important developments in cipher machines, the rotor. Rotary cipher machines were ...

In Part I, you broke a simple cipher. Now try creating a more complex cipher. Cut out the NOVA Decoder Ring and NOVA Cipher Code Ring and the window marked INDEX. You are now going to put this simple ...