Although the development of mathematics, linguistics, and computer science has been quite powerful, there are still some strange password problems that have not yet been cracked. This article selects five unsolved password challenges. No matter which one of them you have cracked, you can enjoy the highest honor in the field of password.
12th palace killer Password
In July 31, 1969, each of the three newspapers received a ciphertext of 1/3, and the author of the ciphertext was the famous zodiac killer. The 12th palace killer asked the three newspapers to publish the ciphertext in the newspaper; otherwise, he would be killed again on the weekend of that week. The three newspapers had to follow suit.
There are a total of 408 characters in the ciphertext. In the future, we will call it 408 ciphertext 408-cipher ). 408 ciphertext is the first secret letter of the 12th palace killer. A week later, a teacher and his wife cracked the ciphertext. David Vinci's movie "The 12th palace killer" fully describes the incident.
408 ciphertext uses the simplest replacement of letters. The difference is that a letter may correspond to multiple symbols. This encryption method can effectively prevent frequent cracking, because you can allow frequently-used letters to correspond to more symbols to ensure that each symbol appears roughly the same number of times. However, cracking such a password is not completely without a breakthrough. The English features such as "Letter Q must be followed by U" can provide many clues. This one-to-multiple replacement encryption method is called the homophone replacement method HomophonicSubstitutionCipher ).
On July 15, November 8 of the same year, the 12th palace killer sent another piece of ciphertext. The ciphertext contains 340 characters, which are called 340 ciphertext. Different from the 408 ciphertext, although we all believe that the 340 ciphertext uses the same tone to replace the encryption, the 340 ciphertext has not been unlocked until now.
340 the full text of the password is as follows: