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MusicURlooking4 t1_ixtiakm wrote

Reply to comment by BenevolentCheese in Emperor Charles V's secret code cracked after five centuries | Spain by future_md_dropout

> After breaking the code, the researchers discovered that the emperor was particularly concerned about a rumor that Italian military leader Pierre Strozzi – who was in the service of Francis I – was planning to assassinate him. However, after being instructed to investigate the situation, Saint-Mauris sent a report back to Charles the following month explaining that there was no truth to the rumor.

> Other details included in the coded letter reveal that Charles V was eager to maintain his delicate peace with Francis I, at least until he could overcome a Lutheran uprising called the Schmalkaldic League, which threatened his empire.

https://www.iflscience.com/holy-roman-emperor-s-secret-code-broken-after-500-years-revealing-assassination-fears-66387

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viper_in_the_grass t1_ixtksj7 wrote

>However, initial results suggested that the software would need a period of time greater than the age of the universe to crack the code.

Wow! Now that was a code!

>Seeking to speed up the process, Pierrot enlisted the help of historian Camille Desenclos, who pointed her in the direction of other letters addressed to Jean de Saint-Mauris. Luckily, one of these documents included a rough key to the code scribbled in the margin.

Of course it did. If this guy lived today, he'd tape his passwords under his keyboard.

>Among the tricks employed by Charles V to throw potential interceptors off the scent were meaningless characters interspersed throughout the text, which acted as red herrings that had to be overlooked in order to read the message.

This is really neat!

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[deleted] t1_ixtn7la wrote

[deleted]

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jjolla888 t1_ixtnvh4 wrote

i thought salting is what you add to passwords that you use for encrypting.

the dude was obfuscating his text before encrypting. is this the same thing?

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[deleted] t1_ixtqlp9 wrote

[deleted]

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Bisping t1_ixttn20 wrote

Minor correction. Its before hashing, not encryption.

Theyre similar concepts, except hashes are meant to be irreversible, and thats how passwords are stored with best practice.

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tickettoride98 t1_ixu3qh6 wrote

That's not what the article says. It's saying there were meaningless characters in the set of encrypted characters (which was not 1:1 with letters, but some corresponded to whole words, or vowels).

Nothing in the article says the characters were added "before encryption". The encryption wasn't a block cipher or anything like that, what you're claiming would have had no effect.

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topiast t1_ixu3zyz wrote

You're right, it's more like obfuscating like the other poster said. My apologies

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Blazerer t1_ixvn4h0 wrote

Would probably make sense to edit your original comment then, as most people won't bother to go down this chain of you claiming to be right twice, and then turning out to be wrong from the start.

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topiast t1_ixvy9g5 wrote

Just deleted it instead It doesn't matter so much but it's good form

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catsloveart t1_ixz0xa5 wrote

what is salting

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jjolla888 t1_ixz4h6a wrote

salting is adding some random characters to your password to create a new password. this way if you picked an easy password such as "1234" .. the actual password applied would be something like "1234&h*kl$" .. impossible for a hacker trying the most common passwords to crack the encryption.

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kallix1ede t1_ixtl5x2 wrote

Bro used Nord VPN

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GozerDGozerian t1_ixuzs2i wrote

> meaningless characters interspersed throughout the text, which acted as red herrings

What a great trick.

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IsilZha t1_ixwo0ri wrote

Hah, that last part about nonsense letters especially reminds me...

My friend and I in 7th grade made our own written code. It was just letter replacement with new symbols, but:

The written spacing was irrelevant. We had several characters that all just took the place of spaces. When writing something out it would have random spaces.

And much like that last part, we also had several nonsense characters that meant nothing.

I would have saved what we had made, except I recall after we memorized it we destroyed/thew out all the answer keys, on purpose. lol I hardly remember any of it now.

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LegalAction t1_ixwy2co wrote

You made a Caesar cypher. Can you decode why it's called a Caesar cypher?

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IsilZha t1_ixwyj3o wrote

eh, it's a substitution cipher. A Caesar cipher is specifically doing a fixed letter shift (IE: go 8 letters to the right) with the same alphabet. We made up entirely new symbols. We also added dummy symbols and symbols for spaces and wrote it out randomly spaced.

I mean, it was still 7th grade kid level, for sure. lol

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LegalAction t1_ixwzr9g wrote

Have you seen one of these?

You need to know the diameter of the stick to get the letters to line up correctly.

It can probably be brute forced, but it would take a minute if you are carving these things by hand.

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Dr-P-Ossoff t1_ixvl8ch wrote

Whoa, he is better than wwII signalers

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isawagoose t1_ixw4vca wrote

He was a horrifically inbred moron; he absolutely did not come up with this code.

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BenevolentCheese t1_ixumjds wrote

Still want to see the actual contents of the letter, not a description of what it contained.

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vix86 t1_ixvcr6m wrote

There was a photo linked in the article.

And this is the cipher.

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c0224v2609 t1_ixx52oz wrote

Great! Now all we need is someone that can decode and transcribe the page!

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