🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1eg7a1INNjmg@gap.caltech.edu> palmer@cco.caltech.edu (David M. Palmer) writes:
>What is the status of the Beale ciphers and attempts to crack it?
>Have NSA people dropped a few Cray-years on it with the Library of
>Congress as the source of potential keys? 

Here's the article I wrote for the sci.crypt FAQ that was forming a year
ago.  A summary of my Cryptologia paper (referenced below) can be found
in Dorothy Denning's "Cryptography and Data Security".  Naturally I think
that's the most important Beale reference. :-)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
FAQ: What are the Beale Ciphers, and are they a hoax?

The story in a pamphlet by J. B. Ward (1885) goes: Thomas Jefferson
Beale and a party of adventurers accumulated a huge mass of treasure and
buried it in Bedford County, Virginia, leaving three ciphers with an
innkeeper; the ciphers describe the location, contents, and intended
beneficiaries of the treasure.  Ward gives a decryption of the second
cipher (contents) called B2; it was encrypted as a book cipher using the
initial letters of the Declaration of Independence (DOI) as key.  B1 and
B3 are unsolved; many documents have been tried as the key to B1.

Afficionados can join a group that attempts to solve B1 by various means
with an eye toward splitting the treasure:

	The Beale Cypher Association
	P.O. Box 236
	Warrington, PA 18976

You can get the ciphers from the rec.puzzles FAQL by including the line
	send index
in a message to netlib@peregrine.com and following the directions.

Some believe the story is a hoax.  Kruh (Cryptologia 12,4 Oct 88) gives
a long list of problems with the story.  Gillogly (Cryptologia 4,2 Apr 80)
decrypted B1 with the DOI and found some unexpected strings, including
ABFDEFGHIIJKLMMNOHPP.  Hammer (president of the Beale Cypher Association)
agrees that this string couldn't appear by chance, but feels there must be
an explanation; Gwyn (sci.crypt expert) is unimpressed with this string.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	U.S. National Debt: $4,139,581,836,252
	Your Share: $16,183