A SOFTWARE APPLICATION OF ANCIENT SYLLABARIES TO CRYPTOGRAPHY

Cryptologia, 2020

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.

Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, 2024

Nepal, Aaradh, and Francesco Perono Cacciafoco. (2024). Minoan Cryptanalysis: Computational Approaches to Deciphering Linear A and Assessing Its Connections with Language Families from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea Areas. In Revesz, Peter Z. (Ed.). (2024). Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. Basel: MDPI: 215-227. - During the Bronze Age, the inhabitants of regions of Crete, mainland Greece, and Cyprus inscribed their languages using, among other scripts, a writing system called Linear A. These symbols, mainly characterized by combinations of lines, have, since their discovery, remained a mystery. Not only is the corpus very small, but it is challenging to link Minoan, the language behind Linear A, to any known language. Most decipherment attempts involve using the phonetic values of Linear B, a grammatological offspring of Linear A, to ‘read’ Linear A. However, this yields meaningless words. Recently, novel approaches to deciphering the script have emerged which involve a computational component. In this paper, two such approaches are combined to account for the biases involved in provisionally assigning Linear B phonetic values to Linear A and to shed more light on the possible connections of Linear A with other scripts and languages from the region. Additionally, the limitations inherent in such approaches are discussed. Firstly, a feature-based similarity measure is used to compare Linear A with the Carian Alphabet and the Cypriot Syllabary. A few Linear A symbols are matched with symbols from the Carian Alphabet and the Cypriot Syllabary. Finally, using the derived phonetic values, Linear A is compared with Ancient Egyptian, Luwian, Hittite, Proto-Celtic, and Uralic using a consonantal approach. Some possible word matches are identified from each language. - Keywords: Linear A; Minoan; cryptanalysis; computational linguistics; language decipherment

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings

This paper contains all steps regarded as necessary and relevant towards the decryption of the epigraph placed in the "Turbolo Chapel" of the Neapolitan Church of Santa Maria La Nova. The inscription has been processed by means of Python-written procedures in combination with the decryption software AZdecrypt, thus displaying linguistic features converging unequivocally to the hypothesis that its clear-text be encrypted by monoalphabetic substitution from a natural language, possibly alongside with transposition and polyalphabetism. A preliminary analysis on characters n-grams and vocals-consonants combinations has not succeeded yet in individuating any clear-text language among all the analysed corpora.

Information, 2024

During the Bronze Age, the inhabitants of regions of Crete, mainland Greece, and Cyprus inscribed their languages using, among other scripts, a writing system called Linear A. These symbols, mainly characterized by combinations of lines, have, since their discovery, remained a mystery. Not only is the corpus very small, but it is challenging to link Minoan, the language behind Linear A, to any known language. Most decipherment attempts involve using the phonetic values of Linear B, a grammatological offspring of Linear A, to ‘read’ Linear A. However, this yields meaningless words. Recently, novel approaches to deciphering the script have emerged which involve a computational component. In this paper, two such approaches are combined to account for the biases involved in provisionally assigning Linear B phonetic values to Linear A and to shed more light on the possible connections of Linear A with other scripts and languages from the region. Additionally, the limitations inherent in such approaches are discussed. Firstly, a feature-based similarity measure is used to compare Linear A with the Carian Alphabet and the Cypriot Syllabary. A few Linear A symbols are matched with symbols from the Carian Alphabet and the Cypriot Syllabary. Finally, using the derived phonetic values, Linear A is compared with Ancient Egyptian, Luwian, Hittite, Proto-Celtic, and Uralic using a consonantal approach. Some possible word matches are identified from each language. Keywords: Linear A; Minoan; cryptanalysis; computational linguistics; language decipherment

International Journal of Computer Sciences and Engineering, 2021

Technology is the key to innovation in all aspects of this modern age. In any technology, data becomes the most important asset to protect. Many encryption algorithms are widely available and used in information security. Encryption can provide secure information across the platform. Encrypting the message using natural languages reduces encryption time and improves performance. Telugu is the oldest Dravidian language spoken in South India. The message to be encoded is translated into Telugu, after which this translated text is converted into a randomly generated combination of 2-bit English alphabets. This is a hybrid algorithm because the intermediate node is encrypted using the standard advanced encryption algorithm to improve the privacy of the text. Because Telugu encryption method uses three phases, namely translation, mapping, and encryption, this makes the data much more secure than existing algorithms like Blowfish and Data Encryption Standard (DES), and the person trying to decrypt must have knowledge of the Telugu language, as well as mapping details to see the original data and This algorithm shows a stronger avalanche effect of 96.5%, which is greater than Blowfish and DES. Evaluation of the proposed algorithm shows that it runs faster and has relatively less encryption time, less memory requirements.

International Journal of Computer Applications, 2013

This paper provides a security method which can be used for data that contains alphabets, numerals and some special symbols during their transmission. A discussion about cryptology and the existing Polybius cipher is made. The existing Polybius cipher is based on the use of a 5X5 matrix of letters constructed using numbers from 1 to 5. This square can allow the text that contains alphabets only. For this reason, we have proposed an improvement to the existing Polybius cipher, in which an 8X8 matrix can be constructed.

PLOS ONE, 2019

Languages have inherent characteristics that make them their own and differentiated entities within their phyla and families. Even messages written in any language and later encrypted by cryptographic systems do not lose all of their characteristics, there remain aspects that help the cryptanalyst to recover them without knowing the decryption keys. For the characterization of the languages we will consider the frequencies of their graphemic and phonetic units and the Index of Coincidence, tools of fundamental utility in the field of Cryptography. Their diachronic invariance or survival over time in one language and their ability to discriminate against other languages will be analized. In order to do so, we will examine a total of 101 languages of which 261 texts have been taken. All of them are very diverse in style and time, taking us through a wide linguistic and temporal spectrum that will cover the period from the 6th century BC to the present day.

Ancient Origins, 2024

The article summarizes the challenges that the Minoan script provides its aspiring glyph-breakers with and the strategies that my Team and I implemented, over the years, to better understand this elusive writing system. In particular, we tried to develop a completely unbiased approach, without any 'wild guess' inherent in the possible language (commonly called 'Minoan') 'hidden' behind Linear A. To do that, we needed to avail ourselves of cryptanalytic techniques historically used to break man-made crypto-systems, with an unavoidable and very strong computational approach. Undeciphered writing systems, despite being invented to facilitate (written) communication, became, over time, with the loss of their knowledge by speakers and people able to read and understand them, unintended crypto-systems. Attempts at deciphering them through Cryptanalysis (the branch of Cryptology - opposed to Cryptography - dealing with the decryption of ciphers) are, therefore, quite reasonable and often represent the only possible solution. In our case, we decided to implement a cryptanalytic 'brute force attack' aimed at systematically testing all the possible Linear A syllabograms against all the possible phonetic values from geographically and chronologically compatible (and deciphered) languages from the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and surrounding areas, looking for plausibly significant phonetic and phonological matches.

During recent years, information security plays major roles with the wide use and development in communications networks. Stronger encryption and decryption represent the important demand in most applications. This strength can be achieved by data encryption and decryption algorithms which are very hard to crack and accomplish. The CIA security aims are Confidentiality, Integrity and Authenticity. In this paper, a novel cryptographic system was proposed based on principles of Unicode and crossover; This new combination add high level of security to proposed system. The English plaintext was converted to symbols in Unic ode, key generated based on Arabic alphabet(also converted to Unicode), while the encryption and decryption method implemented depend on crossover principle by encryption and decryption keys K1,K2. Two parents (English plaintext, and encryption key) select ed for mating using Average Crossover method (AC) which product one child only (Encrypted text) and vice versa in decryption method using decryption key. The security was achieved by confusion and diffusion concepts; variations and randomness in the encryp ted text make the features of the original language are unclear; so the prediction of the plain text is difficult.

International Journal of Security and Its Applications, 2017

This paper proposes a novel hybrid encryption algorithm that utilizes the natural language phonetics significantly. The encryption process is based on two major aspects. The first is the phonetic difference between languages and their mapping into Human Machine interface tools such as the computer keyboard. The second aspect is the embedded ciphering process as a mean of private key exchange (PKE). Such a key will be used to determine all the ciphering parameters. The presented encryption protocol is an end-to-end process and the choices of languages and machine interface is completely user dependant. The creation of ciphering parameters such as the indicator, the key, the array and the operation are also user defined. This work explores several examples for each choice using the Arabic language as a model for the phonetic intermediate language. The keyboard character mapping is used based on the location of characters in the multilingual keyboard. Both fixed location mapping and variable location shifting are introduced.