Cipher cracking 2009 weekly progress

Weekly progress and questions

This is where you record your progress and ask questions. Make sure you update this every week. The deadline is every Friday evening. However, if you sometimes slip a little into the weekend (so long as you don't do it too often) we won't be too hard on your marks.

Semester 1 Week 1

Andrew

This Week

1. Initiated organisation of first group meeting with Denley, Prof Abbott and Dr Berryman. This meeting occurred on thursday March 5^th.
2. Reread newspaper article concerning the somerton man murder that was published in the sunday mail several weeks prior to the meeting, and viewed the code as it originally was. This prompted several discussions, but most suprisingly the inclusion (or lack of) the apparently crossed out line of text.

Next Week Plan

1. Attempt to contact the police museum in an attempt to view the somerton man exibits
2. To view and take photos and video where possible
   • Somerton beach
     • during the day
     • at dusk
   • The gravesite of the man
   • The Adelaide Railway Station
3. Try to find which train line was followed by the somerton man on the day of the murder
   1. Find out time taken to travel to the stop he got off at
      1. If possible, look at different train speeds from then to now
      2. Calculate the most precise time possible allotted for him to write/encrypt the code
   2. Try writing on a train to find how difficult it is to write neatly
4. Hire out National Treasure 1 & 2
   • Watch the Playfair code scene(s)
5. Try to find a copy of Omar Khayyam
   • If possible take photos of it
6. Begin attempts of coding for encrypting/decrypting and e-book
   • Plot relative histograms for letter distributions

Denley

1. Researched case backround: Wikipedia and police site. First group meeting held. Researched Playfair and Vigniere cyphers.

Short Term Goals

1. Visit sites (graveyard and beach) and take pictures etc
2. Research frequencies of letters (in different languages)

Semester 1 Week 2

Denley

• Wrote a simple text counter to count letter frequencies in a given text. George Orwell's 1984 had a frequency characteristic very similar to those given here as general English letter frequencies
• Started playing with encoding decoding algorithms. Got Caesar cypher working. Will work on extending this to Vigenere soon

Short Term Goals

• Track down a copy of National Treasure 2 and rip the scene showing the use of the Playfair cypher
• Try some more eBooks in the frequency calculator and try to get an idea of if/how the English language changes over time and try other European languages too (as Somerton Man had a European look to him)

Andrew

This Week

1. Contacted police museum and organised a meeting (time TBA) on thursday morning
2. researched into railway station, hitting a dead end (cloak room supposedly no longer exists, couldnt find anything to prove this, so let it go)
3. gravesite visit postponed, but have organised to use parents' video camera
4. train trip irrelevant (discovered by further reading), as a bus was taken, and that bus route no longer exists
   • writing on a bus is difficult, supporting the theory that the line in the code that was thought to be crossed out may well not be

Next Week

1. finalise visit to the police museum
2. view somerton beach
3. view Denley's code for generating statistical letter distributions, edit of necessary to simulate certain tests
   • assist Denley with his "changing over time" testing
4. view Omar Khayyam, if possible
5. organise and view cemetary, taking movie/photos

Semester 1 Week 3

Denley

1. Put a few more ebooks through the frequency counter as well as the code itself to get some idea of letter frequencies
2. based on this I did a first attempt at decoding it as a substitution cypher (will put results on wiki soon)
3. Visited police museum and grave site

Short Term Goals

1. still need to get national treasure 2 before the proposal seminar
2. start preparing proposal presentation. This is the main priority at this stage

Andrew

This Week

1. Viewed police museum and grave site, taking pictures and movies
   • noticed hair on the man's bust, look at DNA testing
2. viewed somerton beach: houses from photograph couldnt be identified, but a house similar to a mirror image of the house in the photograph was found
3. found out why my attempt of coding failed while Denleys had succeeded by conversing with Denley
4. collected several samples from several different people writing 50 (approx) letters at random, and have begun to analyze statistically (much more analysis needed though)

Next Week

1. PREPARE FOR PROPOSAL SEMINAR (of greatest importance)
2. analyse random letter samples, create histograms etc to be used in the above

Semester 1 Week 4/5

Denley

1. been busy with job applications and such. hence doing a fortnight report
2. Had project proposal seminar. Went well
3. Implemented encode methods for Playfair cipher (no decode yet)

Short Term Goals

1. Still have a few more applications to do.
2. Will look at encoding some eBooks into Playfair

Andrew

1. writing function to work with playfair cypher (both encrypt and decrypt....apologies for lack of commuinication Denley, i think we have overlapped)
2. have also been busy with job stuff
3. had proposal seminar and practice run (including combining slides).

near future

1. still have to work on job apps
2. complete playfair, then analyse output with various keys and missing letters

See also

• Cipher Cracking 2009

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