Editing Final Report 2010 (section)

==Background==
===Case Background===
[[Image:SomertonManBody.jpg|thumb|right|250px|The dead body of the Somerton Man.]]
At around 6.30 am on December 1st 1948 a dead body was discovered at Somerton Beach, here in South Australia, resting against a rock opposite a home for crippled children.  The post mortem revealed that the man’s organs were too heavily congested for the cause of death to have been natural.  46 years later, in 1994, forensic science was used to determine that the man had died from digitalis which, at the time of the man’s death, was only accessible with a prescription<ref name="Taman Shud Wiki">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case</ref>.

The man was found with several possessions including:
*Cigarettes
*Matches
*A metal comb
*Chewing gum
*A railway ticket to Henley Beach
*A bus ticket; and
*A tram ticket


By far the most intriguing of his possessions however is the small piece of paper with the phrase “Tamam Shud”( meaning "ended" or "finished") on it. This piece of paper was identified to be from a book of poems called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam], a famous Persian poet. After an announcement was made by the police the copy of The Rubaiyat to which the piece of paper belonged was produced by a local person who said he had found the book in the back seat of his unlocked car on the 30th of November<ref name="Taman Shud Wiki"/>. 


The book contained had two things pencilled into it:
*A phone number that lead police to a female named Jestyn.  Jestyn was a nurse that denied all knowledge of the dead man.
*A short code of what appeared to be random or encrypted letters.

===The Code===
[[Image:Somertoncode.jpg|thumb|left|600px|The handwriting of the Somerton Man showing his pencil markings in the back of a book of poetry by Omar Khayyam.]]
The code found in the back of The Rubaiyat revealed a sequence of 40 – 50 letters.  It has been dismissed as unsolvable for some time due to the quality of hand writing and the available quantity of letters. The first character on the first and third line looks like an “M” or “W”, and the fifth line’s first character looks like an “I” or a “V”. The second line is crossed out (and is omitted entirely in previous cracking attempts), and there is an “X” above the “O” on the fourth line. Due to the ambiguity of some of these letters and lines, some possibly wrong assumptions could be made as to what is and isn’t a part of the code.

Professional attempts at unlocking this code were largely limited due to the lack of modern techniques and strategies, because they were carried out decades earlier. When the code was analysed by experts in the Australian Department of Defence in 1978, they made the following statements regarding the code:

* There are insufficient symbols to provide a pattern.
* The symbols could be a complex substitute code or the meaningless response to a disturbed mind.
* It is not possible to provide a satisfactory answer.


To this day, both the identity of the Somerton Man and the code has yet to be solved and provides the basis for our research project. Due to the apparent cause of death, a spy theory also began circulating. In 1947, The US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service, as part of Operation Venona, discovered that there had been top secret material leaked from Australia’s Department of External Affairs to the Soviet embassy in Canberra. Three months prior to the death of the Somerton Man, on the 16th of August 1948, an overdose of digitalis was reported as the cause of death for US Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White, who had been accused of Soviet espionage under Operation Venona. Due to the possible similar causes of their death, this added to suspicions of the unknown man being a Soviet spy.

===Project Background===
Probably since the beginning of recognizable human behaviour, coding has been fundamental to all human groups. It was a way to enable communication when ordinary spoken or written language was difficult or impossible. But for as long as communication was needed, concealment, too, seems to be just as common in human societies. Secret languages and gestures are characteristic of many human groups, serving as a means of concealing messages.

[[Image:National Treasure Playfair Cipher.jpg|thumb|left|250px|The Playfair Cipher - A scene from National Treasure 2:Book of Secrets]]
A cipher system is the systematic concealment of a message by substituting words or phrases with a different set of characters. They began to be widely used in the 16th century, but they date back as far as 6th century BC<ref name="Code Book">The Secrets of Codes: Understanding the World of Hidden Messages by Paul Lunde</ref>.

Coding and cipher systems have historically been limited to espionage or warfare, but the recent transformation of communication technology has added new opportunities and challenges for the budding cryptologist. We live in an age, with computerised communication, where the most valuable commodity is code and the second most valuable is the private information that it gives access to. In order to guard this information, we use encryption systems that have to be continually updated as every encryption system is eventually foiled. How to preserve privacy in an electronic age is one of the burning questions of our time<ref name="Code Book"/>.

This project focuses mainly on substitution ciphers (codes in which the letters have been replaced with different letters<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_cipher</ref>) to determine the secret of the Somerton Man's code. In particular, we focus on the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playfair_cipher Playfair Cipher], the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigen%C3%A8re_cipher Vigenere Cipher], and the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad One-time pad].