The International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript, which took place 30 November and 1 December 2022, was the first peer-reviewed conference that was dedicated entirely to the Voynich MS. The only similar event took place ten years earlier at Villa Mondragone, Frascati, Italy, with invited presentations but without published proceedings (Schmeh, 2013). This paper summarises the event, its preparation and organisation, with a summary of the papers that were presented and potential avenues for further research.
In this paper, we study the impact of language models (LM) on decipherment of historical homophonic substitution ciphers.In particular, we investigate if decipherment by using hill-climbing and simulated annealing can benefit from LMs generated from historical texts in general and century-specific texts in particular.We carry out experiments on homophonic substitution ciphers with English and German as plaintext languages.We take into account ciphertext length as well as n-gram size of the LMs.We compare the results on decipherment based on historical LMs with large LMs generated from modern texts.The results show that using historical LMs in decipherment of homophonic substitution ciphers leads to significantly better performance on ciphertext produced in the 17th century or earlier, and centuryspecific language models yield better results on longer and older ciphertexts.
Runic script is an alphabetic system based on a non-alphabetical order row.The oldest row contained 24 letters but was reduced to 16 in Scandinavia around 800, and enlarged to 28 then 31 letters in England between 7 th and 10 th century (See Düwel, 2008).Runic script also adopted various original encryption systems during Viking and Middle Ages.Recent and very complete studies help us to understand the way they worked, both on social and technical levels.Nevertheless, the very first uses of cryptography are probably far much older and could have even occurred since runic script is first attested, that is in the end of 2 nd century.It should be emphasized that it was based on a visual effect and riddles which goal was to make guess names rather than magical formulae.Indeed, the use of magical formulae is only attested lately, in the medieval times in Scandinavia and England inscriptions, and it is clearly related to Christian prayers and Kabbala (Bauer, 2020).This article aims to provide a chronology and a typology of possible cryptography techniques used with runic script in its earliest period.
From 1940 to 1942 a group of Polish codebreakers, authors of the initial Enigma breakthrough, had been working at the P.C. Cadix, a secret codebreaking center situated in the unoccupied France. Their work in this period, and in particular the circumstances of their evacuation after the German/Italian occupation of Vichy France, are shrouded in mystery. This paper represents an attempt to put information known so far into a broader context, revealing in the process possible distortions and omissions in the accounts of the participants of the events.
