PT Journal
AU Beata Megyesi
   Bernhard Esslinger
   Alicia Fornes
   Nils Kopal
   Benedek Lang
   George Lasry
   Karl de Leeuw
   Eva Pettersson
   Arno Wacker
   Michelle Waldispuhl
TI Decryption of historical manuscripts: the DECRYPT project
SO Cryptologia
JI CRYPT
PY 2020
BP 545
EP 559
VL 44
IS 6
DE automatic decryption; cipher collection; historical cryptology; image transcription
AB Many historians and linguists are working individually and in an uncoordinated fashion on the identification and decryption of historical ciphers. This is a time-consuming process as they often work without access to automatic methods and processes that can accelerate the decipherment. At the same time, computer scientists and cryptologists are developing algorithms to decrypt various cipher types without having access to a large number of original ciphertexts. In this paper, we describe the DECRYPT project aiming at the creation of resources and tools for historical cryptology by bringing the expertise of various disciplines together for collecting data, exchanging methods for faster progress to transcribe, decrypt and contextualize historical encrypted manuscripts. We present our goals and work-in progress of a general approach for analyzing historical encrypted manuscripts using standardized methods and a new set of state-of-the-art tools. We release the data and tools as open-source hoping that all mentioned disciplines would benefit and contribute to the research infrastructure of historical cryptology.
ER