Daily Archives: 12/15/2003

Crypto Smorgasborg


In a bit of synchronicity, today’s llinks have a decidedly crypto
theme. Julian sent me a
link to the Enigma-E, a modern electronic equivalent to the original Enigma machine. Unfortunately, these are apparently only available in the UK and the Netherlands (so far), otherwise my credit card would be debitted already. It just seems too cool.
Bruce Schneier’s Cryptogram
coincidently arrived, and had a couple of interesting links. The first was a list of unsolved codes and ciphers. I knew of a number of the more famous ones, such as the Beale and Voynich ciphers, but didn’t realize that some of the cryptographic messages from the Zodiac killer remained unbroken.
Another good link was to a collection of papers on fooling biometric fingerprint readers. I’ve seen a lot in the news about increasing use of these sensors, and it’s interesting to see how easily they may be fooled.