Improved decipherment of homophonic ciphers

Abstract

In this paper, we present two improvements to the beam search approach for solving homophonic substitution ciphers presented in Nuhn et al. (2013): An improved rest cost estimation together with an optimized strategy for obtaining the order in which the symbols of the cipher are deciphered reduces the beam size needed to successfully decipher the Zodiac-408 cipher from several million down to less than one hundred: The search effort is reduced from several hours of computation time to just a few seconds on a single CPU. These improvements allow us to successfully decipher the second part of the famous Beale cipher (see (Ward et al., 1885) and e.g. (King, 1993)): Having 182 different cipher symbols while having a length of just 762 symbols, the decipherment is way more challenging than the decipherment of the previously deciphered Zodiac- 408 cipher (length 408, 54 different symbols). To the best of our knowledge, this cipher has not been deciphered automatically before.