Pigpen Cipher Explained (and Broken) - The Most Famous Cipher of the Freemasons

#cryptology, #cryptography, #cryptanalysis
In this video, I explain how you can create a pigpen cipher and how to encrypt and decrypt text with the pigpen cipher.
First, I give a short introduction to the pigpen cipher. Then, I show how the cipher is constructed. After that, I present the keyspace size of the cipher in a short cryptanalysis part. Finally, we have a look at an original pigpen ciphertext presented on Klaus Schmeh's Blog. First, I create a transcription of it. Then, I cryptanalyze and decrypt it using CrypTool 2.
The used pigpen font for the example encryption can be downloaded here: fontmeme.com/schriftarten/pig...
The (German) blog article of Klaus Schmeh with the pictures of the pigpen postcard is here: scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypt...
If you are interested in learning the basics of cryptology, you should also have a look at our video series about basics of cryptology - also for beginners: • Basics of Cryptology -...
You may download the latest version of CrypTool 2 from here: www.cryptool.org/en/ct2/downl...

[@dualkem1759]

Great video! Now that I think of that, regardless of the MonoAlphSubt encoding, the biggest time-waster is the conversion between characters and intermediate letters. An AI that could recognize those would be awesome for everybody in the cryptanalysis field.

[@CryptographyForEverybody]

Hello Dualkem, Thank you for the kind words, and also, you are right - making a transcription is a tedious work! And that is exactly one part of the DECRYPT project, which I am part of :-) We are researching possibilities to (semi-)automate the creation of transcriptions using machine learning. See our whitepaper (open-access): www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2020.1716410 Greetings, Nils

[@sol3cito33]

A very elegant cipher but - as any simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher - fairly easy to break. Nevertheless, it is one of the most enjoyable and aesthetic looking ciphers to work with.

[@andrewmoody3112]

Is there any benefit combining a pigpen with a Vernam cipher, or is the sender simply wasting time by throwing an already unbreakable code into pigpen?

[@CryptographyForEverybody]

Yes, he is wasting time 🙂

[@CryptographyForEverybody]

And the reason you already gave. Vernam (one time pad) is already unbreakable (if used correctly). So you wonˋt have any benefit using the pigpen. You would probably only annoy your receiver 😁

[@andrewmoody3112]

@@CryptographyForEverybody excellent. Thanks!

[@CryptographyForEverybody]

Thank you - you are welcome 🙂

[@richardpeterson3753]

by itself it's easy to break.but when added layers of encryption to this,it becomes much more effective.by useing shapes to represent letters,you make it difficult to know what letter is represented.there are ways to make this resistant to frequency analysis.

[@CryptographyForEverybody]

Hiho, A pigpen cipher, regardless of which symbol assignment you use, is always easy to break since it remains being a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher. By adding additional layers of encryption you can strengthen any type of cipher -- but then, in this case here, it is not a pigpen cipher anymore :-). In fact, this is how modern ciphers work. They introduce rounds, which repeat simple building blocks (substitution and permutation/transposition) to add complexity (and security) to the cipher. Greetings, Nils

[@toshio956]

So what is the point?