Some Interactive Tools for Examining Renaissance Ciphers
Proceedings of Bridges 2016: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Education, Culture
Pages 561–564
Short Papers
Abstract
This paper describes interactive tools for exploring the ciphers in Johannes Trithemius’ Steganographia (1500). These tools have been implemented on the website Trithemius Redivivus (http://trithemius.com
) and provide capabilities to (1) apply Trithemius’ cryptographic techniques on any text, (2) display letter-frequency histograms of the output, and (3) rank the outputs according to their relative entropy, computed with respect to a reference text.