200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of treasure buried in Virginia

http://mentalfloss.com/article/540277/beale-ciphers-buried-treasure

by prostoalex • 8 years ago

78 39 8 years ago

Animats• 8 years ago

A book code. Someone could run it against every digitized book earlier than the date of the code. With enough off-peak AWS instances...

janwillemb• 8 years ago

The problem would be to define what is considered a successful outcome, measurable by an automated system.

tobinfricke3• 8 years ago

Indeed, even if you decode the supposedly "cracked" Beale letter, you get nearly complete gibberish:

ihaie depos otedi nthec opntt olBed oorta boupf ourmi lesfr ombul ordsi nanep caiat ionor iault sipfe stbel owthe surla csoft hhgto undth sfotl owing artic issbe aongi ngjoi otltt othep artfe swhos lnamf sateg iieti nnumb erthr ffhtt ewith

https://nibot-lab.livejournal.com/tag/beale%20ciphers

It's almost certainly a hoax.

analogmemory• 8 years ago

Wouldn't a successful outcome just be recognizable sentences?

ComplexSystems• 8 years ago

There are, I dunno, maybe 1,000,000 words in the English language. With a book cipher, almost all books will produce gibberish words not on the list. If you find one for which almost all words are magically on that list of 1,000,000 words, you win.

I get the appeal of the notion that some second grader could stumble on the winning book and claim the prize, but this article is like halfway between cryptographic fantasy and reality. Google suggests there are only 130,000,000 books in existence, which would be more than easy enough to brute force if we had access to all of them. Furthermore, there is a clear success criterion. The limiting factor is that not all books have been digitized, but if the book is relatively well known, it should be.

I'm surprised someone at Google hasn't just put this whole thing to bed by now.

hagreet• 8 years ago

"As long as a key is available, a substitution cipher is a safe, simple way to encrypt a message." ...quality article

AppleseedJenny2• 8 years ago

Yeah. They should just use ROT13 as substitution. Then key availability is not an issue anymore.

onion2k• 8 years ago

For extra security it's important to run ROT13 twice.

yorwba2• 8 years ago

I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic, but the article is essentially correct. The security of an encryption algorithm doesn't depend on how complex it is if you never reuse the key, because a uniformly random key produces uniformly random output for any input. Only key reuse can introduce statistical regularities that allow cryptanalysis to be applied. The reason most encryption algorithms are more complex than simple substitution is exactly that they are intended to allow applying a relatively short key multiple times, both to encrypt messages longer than the key and to encrypt multiple messages.

ShorsHammer• 8 years ago

Also known as a One Time Pad for anyone wanting more info, generally the key and message are xor'd if its digital and that's the entirety of the encryption algorithm.

Used properly it's proven to be unbreakable.

shawnz• 8 years ago

a uniformly random key produces uniformly random output for any input.

This is clearly not true for a simple substitution cipher though, otherwise it couldn't be attacked with frequency analysis

raverbashing• 8 years ago

There's a world of difference between a substitution cypher that maps the same characters to the same code points and one that doesn't.

The former is trivially crackable and the latter is a "one time pad" hard (which is how the texts were created)

wet_grass_sound• 8 years ago

What is point of finding it if the govt is going to claim it?

nighthawk1• 8 years ago

After black swan, it seems like big treasure hunting is close to hopeless https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Swan_Project

sethrin• 8 years ago

"The ineffable truth of this case is that the Mercedes is a naval vessel of Spain and that the wreck of this naval vessel, the vessel's cargo, and any human remains are the natural and legal patrimony of Spain."

Legal opinion seems to be fairly solid on this point. Perhaps the lesson instead should be to not pillage national warships.

macintux• 8 years ago

Virginia has a finders keepers law per the article.

killaken20002• 8 years ago

I hear that money has a connection to crime. Time for a civil asset forfeiture.

behringer• 8 years ago

Don't store your treasure in the US...

rwallace• 8 years ago

That attitude would reign among professional cryptanalysts until January 1970, when Dr. Carl Hammer, Director of Computer Sciences at Sperry-Univac, made a startling revelation at the Third Annual Simulation Symposium in Tampa, Florida. He had analyzed the Beale ciphers with a UNIVAC 1108 computer and compared the codes to the musings of a random number generator. The results showed signs of an intelligent pattern.
“Beale Cyphers 1 and 3 are ‘for real,’” Hammer concluded. “They are not random doodles but do contain intelligence and messages of some sort. Further attempts at decoding are indeed warranted.”

Be careful of concluding that. The human brain is a bad random number generator. A hoaxer trying to write random gibberish in those days would do it by hand, not by rolling dice to ensure uniform randomness, and the handwritten gibberish would inevitably contain patterns.

flashman• 8 years ago

The first cipher gives directions in yards, in this order: east, south, west, north. When followed in order, this gives a location just north of an old dolomite quarry, 3.95 miles from Buford's Tavern. It's not far off the Appalachian Trail, but not so close that you would stumble on it accidentally.

DoctorOetker7• 8 years ago

Wow!

What is the probability that a trivial variation on the decoding method results in otherwise unreadable text BUT STARTING with "sited at" ??? roughly 26^6?!?

1) I used/fixed Tobin Fricke's (@tobinfricke) doi-decode.c to first fix the indexing/versions of the Declaration of Independence. The result can be found in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17337421

2) Due to the quasi alphabetic sequences in beale.1 I came to the conclusion that beale.1 is in fact just scratchpad notes containing fragments of look-up table to use while encrypting, so is not the location file. Bummed at the lack of a location file, I just pressed on out of curiosity for the names file (beale.3)

3) I next tried some trivial variations on the cipher concept (second letter of each word, last letter etc) such that the kolmogorov complexity increase of the decoding would be nearly zero, but always got rubbish.

4) Until I tried a trivial variation (not giving yet, perhaps after convincing myself it is absurd coincidence), giving "sitedat...." with "..." being rubbish text.

EDIT1: the same decoding also contains "twograil" somewhere in the middle, but not as convincing, does "two grail" signifiy something in the area?

200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of treasure buried in Virginia

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