this is actually something i've studied! As an avid knitter and software engineer I had to take cryptology classes in school, and it was the topic of one of my research projects.
Knitting is ultimately a binary system (knit, purl) and as such it's fairly straightforward to figure out how to send messages on a basic level (say, assign a "knit" as a 1 and a "purl" as a 0). this is at least suspected to be similar to the method Madame DeFarge used in "A Tale of Two Cities", underneath a further level of code (although instead of calling it binary, we can assume certain combinations of knit/purl = a singular letter). I've also done encoded lace in base-16, morse, and binary in colorwork.
I believe it got to the point that during one of the world wars, the sale of knitting patterns was prohibited overseas for fear of sending encoded messages. Alas, they did not forbid the sale of or shipping of knitted objects.
Esherymack t1_ja7wpcu wrote
Reply to TIL: The concept of steganography which is the hiding of messages in plain sight. For example, Phyllis Latour Doyle (British spy) parachuted into France to spy on Nazis before D-day. She used knitting to record messages. by Geek_Nan
this is actually something i've studied! As an avid knitter and software engineer I had to take cryptology classes in school, and it was the topic of one of my research projects.
Knitting is ultimately a binary system (knit, purl) and as such it's fairly straightforward to figure out how to send messages on a basic level (say, assign a "knit" as a 1 and a "purl" as a 0). this is at least suspected to be similar to the method Madame DeFarge used in "A Tale of Two Cities", underneath a further level of code (although instead of calling it binary, we can assume certain combinations of knit/purl = a singular letter). I've also done encoded lace in base-16, morse, and binary in colorwork.
I believe it got to the point that during one of the world wars, the sale of knitting patterns was prohibited overseas for fear of sending encoded messages. Alas, they did not forbid the sale of or shipping of knitted objects.