It’s been more than 25 years since Ron Rivest invented his RC4 stream cipher, and after all that time it’s still being used widely, which is something of an achievement in the crypto world. However, ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

What secret alchemical knowledge could be so important it required sophisticated encryption? The setting was Amsterdam, 2019. A conference organized by the Society for the History of Alchemy and ...

A 400-year-old coded text found at the Vatican Library is among the historic documents and messages that are being cracked with the help of artificial intelligence.

The Voynich manuscript has long been shorthand for the unsolved and the unknowable, a late medieval codex filled with looping glyphs that refuse to yield a single clear sentence. A new cryptologic ...

The envelope arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969 without a return address, its directive to the recipient, in handwriting distinctively slanted and words unevenly spaced, to ...

BEATA MEGYESI strode past the Pontifical Swiss Guards, in their Renaissance-era uniforms. She was headed not for the Sistine Chapel or St Peter’s Basilica, but the Vatican’s archives. Precious few ...

What secret alchemical knowledge could be so important it required sophisticated encryption? The setting was Amsterdam, 2019. A conference organized by the Society for the History of Alchemy and ...