@ouelletteLostFoundCodebreakers2023

[!info] - Cite Key: @ouelletteLostFoundCodebreakers2023 - Abstract: The cache of letters sheds new light on Mary Stuart's years of captivity in England. - Bibliography: Ouellette, J. 2023. Lost and found: Codebreakers decipher 50+ letters of Mary, Queen of Scots. Ars Technica, 8 February 2023. Available at https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/lost-and-found-code-breakers-decipher-50-letters-of-mary-queen-of-scots/ [Last accessed 9 February 2023].

Annotations¶

%% begin annotations %% - "she engaged in what's known as "letter-locking," a common practice at the time to protect private letters from prying eyes" - interesting form of mideval encryption - "Those "locked" Vatican letters dated back to the 15th and 16th centuries, and they featured strange slits and corners that had been sliced off. Dambrogio realized that the letters had originally been folded in an ingenious manner, essentially "locked" by inserting a slice of the paper into a slit, then sealing it with wax. It would not have been possible to open the letter without ripping that slice of paper—providing evidence that the letter had been tampered with." - This is a very interesting form of tamper-proofing information as we discussed in class wax seals where created to do the same but where relativly trivial to bypass, this seems to be a more complex solution - "They stumbled upon several collections at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France's online archives, identifying 57 documents fully written in cipher. Other items in the collection dated from the 1520s and 1530s and were primarily concerned with "Italian affairs." None of the text in the letters was written in clear language, so it wasn't possible to determine who wrote them without first deciphering them." - It seems crazy that there are letters from ~500 years ago that have yet to be decrypted when anything from the past few decades can easily be decrypted with modern computing and the ever changing field of security. Really speaks to the ingenuity of physical encryption I suppose - "There were already several known letters between the two, so Lasry and his co-authors were able to find some that matched their deciphered material, thereby validating the meaning of several other symbols." - Interesting how that relates to other stories of decrypting information and how powerful context can be for decryption - because so long as an algorithm doesn't have different outputs for the same input at different spots your subject to a frequency analysis and such - %% end annotations %%

%% Import Date: 2023-02-26T15:04:09.188-05:00 %%