10:00 am EDT – FRED KINCH: The Business of SECRETS
Fred Kinch will present stories from his new book, The Business of Secrets – stories about his adventures selling cryptographic equipment to the military and diplomatic intelligence organizations of some 80 countries worldwide. Stories such as:
11:00 am EDT – C. MATEO MÉRIDA: President’s Cyphers
Victoriano Huerta, the “usurper president” of México (Feb. 1913-July 1914) during a period of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), struggled greatly to retain political power. To reach this goal, his presidential administration drafted hundreds of partially encrypted documents with dozens of distinct codes that he sent throughout the country to maintain this control. Prior to my research as a graduate student in history at the Citadel Military College of South Carolina, on behalf of the research of Dr. Nancy Aguirre, these documents had never before been decrypted. These decrypted documents tell the story of a doomed presidential administration which used deception and secrecy in order to retain political power.
11:30 am EDT – PELKABO: Cracking MYSZKOWSKI Ciphers
ACA publications rightly note that solving a cipher requires a solid grasp of its mechanics, but writing a computer program to solve one demands even deeper insight into both the encryption and decryption algorithms. In this talk, I share my efforts to build an automated solver for the Myszkowski cipher, a more intricate variant of columnar transposition. I review common computer-based techniques and introduce a new twist, one inspired, unexpectedly, by a childhood memory.
12:00 pm EDT – LUNCH BREAK
1:00 pm EDT – RYAN GARLICK: A Potential Solution to the Zodiac Killer’s ‘My Name Is’ Cipher
The Zodiac Killer’s Z13 cipher — famously introduced with the phrase “My name is…” — has remained one of the most enduring unsolved pieces of Zodiac lore. Though short, it may yet yield a plausible solution when viewed through the lens of contextual analysis. This presentation explores a proposed solution that aligns with known patterns in Zodiac’s communications and may contain a surprising connection to a former ACA president. Has the solution to this short cipher been hiding in plain sight all along?
1:30 pm EDT – PHILLIES: CROTALUS’s Method for Solving RAILFENCE Ciphers
The RAILFENCE cipher can be a cumbersome cipher to attack. Many methods require graph paper with 60 to 80 squares in length, making the solver have to scotch tape. In 1980, the ACA’s CROTALUS first wrote of a method which is more compact and can be easily used on standard sized graph paper. PHILLIES will demonstrate how to use CROTALUS’s method to solve this type of cipher.
2:00 pm EDT – A RICH ZIP CODE: “Project Skydrop,” or “How GIRASOL, PERL and I Won (Then Lost) $87,000 in Gold”
Project Skydrop, a real-world treasure hunt in Fall 2024, featured a solid gold trophy that doubled as a crypto device. A RICH ZIP CODE recounts how he, GIRASOL, and PERL won $87,000 in gold—only to see it slip away.
3:00 pm EDT – CRYPTOBLOGGER and UNDA: The Ciphers of the Spies
The history of espionage has been inextricably linked with encryption technology for centuries in a fascinating way. The German Chancellor’s spy Günter Guillaume was unmasked in 1974 because West German codebreakers were able to solve encrypted GDR radio messages. Deciphered secret messages were also the undoing of nuclear spy Klaus Fuchs in the 1940s and the legendary Mata Hari in the 1920s. Other secret agents, however, got away with it because their encryption methods proved to be secure. CRYPTOBLOGGER and UNDA will go over these, and many other cipher-related spy stories throughout history.
