Baconian Cipher Decoding
Your alarm goes off and, after hitting “snooze” once or twice, you pry yourself out of bed. You make a cup of coffee to help you get going, and then you shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, and check your phone for messages. On your way to school, you stop to fill your car’s gas tank, almost making you late for the first day of chemistry class. As you find a seat in the classroom, you read the question projected on the screen: “Welcome to class! Why should we study chemistry”
Figures (5)
Key Points
- Bacon's cipher or the Baconian cipher is a method of steganographic message encoding devised by Francis Bacon in 1605.
- To encode a message, each letter of the plaintext is replaced by a group of five of the letters 'A' or 'B'.
- In a ciphertext-only attack, Eve has access only to the ciphertext (good modern cryptosystems are usually effectively immune to ciphertext-only attacks).
Terms
Tap a term for a plain-language explanation.
Sources & licensing(4)
- OpenStax — openstax.org/books/chemistry-2e/pages/1-introduction (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0)
- Wikipedia contributors — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon's_cipher (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)
- Wikipedia contributors — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)
- Wikipedia contributors — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_code (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)