*Includes pictures
*Includes contemporary accounts describing the manuscript and attempts to decipher it
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
"Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve." - Edgar Allan Poe, excerpt from "A Few Words On Secret Writing," 1841
For as long as language and communication have existed, humans have been inventing ways to mask their messages from prying eyes. Military and diplomatic officials often devise secret codes to transmit sensitive data and confidential information to approved parties. This practice has become so commonplace in recent years that entire sciences, hobbies, and fully fledged professions have been established to decipher these cryptic texts, called "cryptographers."
Needless to say, these revolutionary methods of cryptography, though historic, are now considered archaic. Their simplistic secrets have been disclosed to the general public, and even incorporated into children's toys geared towards aspiring spies.
With the bulk of modern civilization so dependent on the virtual world, secret codes have evolved to a whole new level, most notably through data encryption. Data encryption, which aims to conceal classified electronic information through the use of complex ciphers and algorithms, was initially used for governmental and military purposes, but it now acts as the primary medium of security that most online platforms (as of January 2017, at least half of them) provide for their users.
As intricate and inextricable as data encryption might seem to people today, a growing number of brilliant but devious minds continue to successfully find ways to bypass supposedly state-of-the-art encryption software, rendering the efforts of the enormous teams employed to handle online security void. As a matter of fact, stories of unscrupulous hackers stealing episodes of popular TV shows and threatening to unleash them before their release dates, as well as reprobates poaching private images of unfortunate victims for ransom, are becoming increasingly commonplace. Meanwhile, government agencies are staffed with full-type cryptanalysts dedicated to retrieving encrypted intelligence and decoding them in the hopes of learning more about or thwarting potential domestic and foreign threats.
With such incisive minds constantly at work, one could be forgiven for assuming there are no cipher