NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Bacon's cipher

Bacon's cipher or the Baconian cipher is a method of steganography (a method of hiding a secret message as opposed to a true cipher) devised by Francis Bacon. A message is concealed in the presentation of text, rather than its content. This article is about hidden messages. ... This article is about algorithms for encryption and decryption. ... for the painter see Francis Bacon (painter) For other persons named Francis Bacon, see Francis Bacon (disambiguation). ...

To encode a message, each letter of the plain text is replaced by a group of five of the letters 'A' or 'B'. This replacement is done according to the alphabet of the Baconian cipher, shown below.

The writer must make use of two different typefaces for this cipher. After preparing a false message with the same number of letters as all of the As and Bs in the real, secret message, two typefaces are chosen, one to represent As and the other Bs. Then each letter of the false message must be presented in the appropriate typeface, according to whether it stands for an A or a B. ^[1] â€œFontâ€ redirects here. ...

To decode the message, the reverse method is applied. Each "typeface 1" letter in the false message is replaced with an A and each "typeface 2" letter is replaced with a B. The Baconian alphabet is then used to recover the original message.

Any method of writing the message that allows two distinct representations for each character can be used for the Bacon Cipher. Bacon himself prepared a Biliteral Alphabet ^[2] for handwritten capital and small letters with each having two alternative forms, one to be used as A and the other as B. This was published as an illustrated plate in his De Augmentis Scientiarum (The Advancement of Learning).

Because any message of the right length can be used to carry the encoding, the secret message is effectively hidden in plain sight. The false message can be on any topic and thus can distract a person seeking to find the real message.

Bacon and Shakespeare

Some people have suggested that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were in fact written by Francis Bacon citation needed, and that the published plays contain enciphered messages to that effect. Both Ignatius L. Donnelly and Elizabeth Wells Gallup attempted to find such messages by looking for the use of Bacon's cipher in early printed editions of the plays. Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... The frontispiece of the First Folio (1623), the first collected edition of Shakespeares plays From 1593 to 1637, a number of plays and poems were published under the name William Shakespeare or, in many cases, hyphenated as Shake-Speare. The company that performed most of these plays, the Lord... [citation needed] Main article: Category:Articles lacking sources This tag will categorise tagged articles into Category:Articles lacking sources but not this template itself. ... Ignatius Loyola Donnelly (November 3, 1831 â€“ January 1, 1901) was a U.S. Congressman, populist, and writer, known primarily today for his theories on the history of Atlantis and Shakespearean authorship. ... Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1848, Paris, New York â€“ 1934) was an American educator and exponent of the Baconian theory of Shakespearian authorship. ...

A further theory based on Bacon's cipher was published by Edward Clark^[3] referring to an inscription on Shakespeare's funerary monument which used a mixture of letter-shapes. Unfortunately the stone had crumbled and been replaced more than half a century earlier, so Clark had to rely on copies. He was building on an article by Hugh Black^[4] suggesting that the inscription concealed the sentence, "FRA BA WRT EAR AY", an abbreviation of "Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays." Shakespeares funerary monument William Shakespeares funerary monument is located inside Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, UK, the same church in which he was baptised. ...

References

Philosophical Research Society (P.R.S.) is an nonprofit organization founded in 1934, by the prolific American author, mystic and scholar Manly Palmer Hall, which provides learning and development of a Philosophy of life which embraces conciliation of Religion and Science and higher undestandings of life itself. ... William Frederick Friedman (September 24, 1891 - November 12, 1969) served as a US Army cryptologist, running the research division of the Armys Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) through the 1930s and its follow-on services right into the 1950s. ... Elizebeth Friedman Elizebeth Smith Friedman (1892 - 31 October 1980) was cryptanalyst and author, and a pioneer in U.S. cryptography. ... The headquarters of the Cambridge University Press, in Trumpington Street, Cambridge. ... First issue of the North American Review with signature of its editor William Tudor (1779-1830). ...

External Links

Categories: Baconian theory | Steganography In cryptography, the ADFGVX cipher was a field cipher used by the German Army during World War I. ADFGVX was in fact an extension of an earlier cipher called ADFGX. Invented by Colonel Fritz Nebel and introduced in March 1918, the cipher was a fractionating transposition cipher which combined a... The Affine cipher is a special case of the more general substitution cipher. ... The Alberti Cipher was the first ever Polyalphabetic Cipher. ... Atbash is a simple substitution cipher for the Hebrew alphabet. ... A tabula recta for use with an autokey cipher An autokey cipher is a cipher which incorporates the message (the plaintext) into the key. ... In classical cryptography, the bifid cipher is a cipher which combines the Polybius square with transposition, and uses fractionation to achieve diffusion. ... A book cipher is a cipher in which the key is the identity of a book. ... The action of a Caesar cipher is to replace each plaintext letter with one a fixed number of places down the alphabet. ... The Four-square cipher is a manual symmetric encryption technique. ... Hills cipher machine, from figure 4 of the patent In classical cryptography, the Hill cipher is a polygraphic substitution cipher based on linear algebra. ... A keyword is a monoalphabetic substitution. ... -1... In classical cryptography, a permutation cipher is a transposition cipher in which the key is a permutation. ... The pigpen cipher uses graphical symbols assigned according to a key similar to the above diagram. ... The Playfair system was invented by Charles Wheatstone, who first described it in 1854. ... A polyalphabetic cipher is any cipher based on substitution, using multiple substitution alphabets. ... In cryptography, the Polybius square, also known as the Polybius checkerboard, is a device invented by the Ancient Greek historian and scholar Polybius, described in Hist. ... The Rail Fence Cipher is a form of transposition cipher that gets its name from the way in which it is encoded. ... The Reihenschieber was a hand cipher system used by Germany. ... Reservehandverfahren (RHV) (German: Reserve Hand Procedure) was a German Naval World War II hand-cipher system used as a backup method when no working Enigma machine was available[1]. The cipher had two stages: a transposition followed by bigram substitution. ... ROT13 replaces each letter by its partner 13 characters further along the alphabet. ... In classical cryptography, the runnning key cipher is a type of polyalphabetic substitution cipher in which a text, typically from a book, is used to provide a very long key stream. ... This article is about the encryption device; for the Dune character, see Scytale (Dune). ... This article refers to a cipher devised in 2006 by Mr Justice Peter Smith. ... The Solitaire cryptographic algorithm was designed by Bruce Schneier for use in Neal Stephensons Cryptonomicon (where it was initially called Pontifex). ... In cryptography, a straddling checkerboard is a device for converting an alphabetic plaintext into digits whilst simultaneously achieving fractionation (a simple form of information diffusion) and homophony (a simple method for suppressing peaks of the frequency distribution). ... In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encryption by which units of plaintext are substituted with ciphertext according to a regular system; the units may be single letters (the most common), pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth. ... The Tap Code is a code, commonly used by prisoners in jail to communicate with one another. ... In classical cryptography, a transposition cipher changes one character from the plaintext to another (to decrypt the reverse is done). ... In classical cryptography, the trifid cipher is a cipher invented around 1901 by Felix Delastelle, which extends the concept of the bifid cipher to a third dimension, allowing each symbol to be fractionated into 3 elements instead of two. ... The Two-square cipher is a manual symmetric encryption technique. ... The VIC cipher was a pencil and paper cipher used by the Soviet spy Reino Hayhanen, codenamed VICTOR. It was arguably the most complex hand-operated cipher ever seen. ... The VigenÃ¨re cipher is named for Blaise de VigenÃ¨re (pictured), although Giovan Batista Belaso had invented the cipher earlier. ... A typical distribution of letters in English language text. ... In cryptography, coincidence counting is the technique (invented by William F. Friedman) of putting two texts side-by-side and counting the number of times that a letter appears next to itself in both copies. ... For the plants which reproduce by using spores, see Cryptogam. ... In cryptography, the Polybius square, also known as the Polybius checkerboard, is a device invented by the Ancient Greek historian and scholar Polybius, described in Hist. ... This article is about the encryption device; for the Dune character, see Scytale (Dune). ... In cryptography, a straddling checkerboard is a device for converting an alphabetic plaintext into digits whilst simultaneously achieving fractionation (a simple form of information diffusion) and homophony (a simple method for suppressing peaks of the frequency distribution). ... Tabula recta In cryptography, the tabula recta is a square table of alphabets, each one made by shifting the previous one to the left. ... The German Lorenz cipher machine, used in World War II for encryption of very high-level general staff messages Cryptography (or cryptology; derived from Greek ÎºÏÏ…Ï€Ï„ÏŒÏ‚ kryptÃ³s hidden, and the verb Î³ÏÎ¬Ï†Ï‰ grÃ¡fo write or Î»ÎµÎ³ÎµÎ¹Î½ legein to speak) is the study of message secrecy. ... The history of cryptography begins thousands of years ago. ... Cryptanalysis (from the Greek kryptÃ³s, hidden, and analÃ½ein, to loosen or to untie) is the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information, without access to the secret information which is normally required to do so. ... This article is intended to be an analytic glossary, or alternatively, an organized collection of annotated pointers. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Encryption Decryption In cryptography, a block cipher is a symmetric key cipher which operates on fixed-length groups of bits, termed blocks, with an unvarying transformation. ... The operation of the keystream generator in A5/1, a LFSR-based stream cipher used to encrypt mobile phone conversations. ... A big random number is used to make a public-key pair. ... In cryptography, a cryptographic hash function is a hash function with certain additional security properties to make it suitable for use as a primitive in various information security applications, such as authentication and message integrity. ... A cryptographic message authentication code (MAC) is a short piece of information used to authenticate a message. ... A cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator (CSPRNG) is a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) with properties that make it suitable for use in cryptography. ...

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External Links

Bacon and Shakespeare