View source for Cipher Cracking 2009

==Description==
In this project you will attempt to solve a murder that took place in Adelaide in 1948. This crime remains unsolved till today, but you can use engineering to bring our knowledge closer to the killer.

You can read the details about the dead body and the circumstances [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case]

Associated with the dead body was this secret code:

    MRGOABABD
    MTBIMPANETP
    MLIABOAIAQC
    ITTMTSAMSTGAB

(See the wiki page on the case--there may be an extra line, and some of the M's may be W's).

To this day code crackers have been unable to decrypt it.

==Techniques==
You have an advantage that as engineers you know more about information theory and statistics than the average policeman or code breaking expert. You will take a structured approach to writing software code to use a process of elimination to say whether particular coding schemes were used or not.

Start with the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playfair_cipher Playfair cipher] and the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigen%C3%A8re_cipher Vigenère cipher] to begin with and you should find that you can easily test the above sequence of letters to prove the Vigenère cipher was definitely not used*. Then you can go onto exploring [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Classical_ciphers other encryption schemes]
*Note from Matthew: If you include the extra line, I'm not so sure you can prove it's not the Vigenère cipher. Also, given the date of the murder, and the dates of invention of some ciphers, there are some you could reasonably rule out. 

I would also like you to perform simple statistical tests to show if English was the most likely language or not in the original message. Also you should be able to prove if the code is the beginning letter of a sequence of words or is composed of whole words.
A list of letter frequencies for different languages can be found [http://www.bckelk.ukfsn.org/words/etaoin.html here].

Then if you have time and if you are excited to take this project to a higher lever you can start to check out the work of the great electrical engineer Claude Shannon and apply his techniques from information theory. You can measure the information content in the message in terms of bits for starters.

==Possible extension== 
If you knock off this project too easily and are looking for a harder code cracking problem to try your software out on, you can progress to analyzing another famous unsolved mystery: the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript Voynich Manuscript]

== Expectations == 
We don't really expect you to find the killer, though that would be cool if you do and you'll become very famous overnight. To get good marks we expect you to show a logical approach to definitely eliminating which coding schemes were definitely not used. In your conclusion, you need to come up with a short list of likely possibilities and a list of things you can definitely eliminate that the code is not.

== Relationship to possible career path==
Whilst the project is fascinating as you'll learn about a specific murder case--and we do want you to have a lot of fun with it--the project does have a hard-core serious engineering side. It will familairse you with techniques in information theory, probability, statistics, encryption, and decryption. It will also improve your software skills. The types of jobs out there where these skills are useful are in computer security, comms, or in digital forensics. The types of industries that will need you are: the software industry, e-finance industry, IT industry, telecoms industry, [http://www.asio.gov.au/ ASIO], [http://www.asis.gov.au/ ASIS], defence industry (e.g. [http://www.dsd.gov.au/ DSD]), etc. So go ahead and have fun with this, but keep your eye on the bigger engineering picture and try to build up an appreciation of why these techniques are useful to our industry. Now go find that killer...this message will self-destruct in five seconds :-)