Escape Game History: 3 Ciphers Once Considered “Unbreakable”

The Enigma Machine at the National Museum of Scotland (Photo: Nachosan CC-BY 3.0)

If there’s one thing you’ll find in every escape room you play, it’s some sort of code that you’ll have to break. We’re definitely cryptography nerds here at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game, and that’s why we’re so fascinated with the ciphers that no one has been able to solve (see here, here, and here for some of our faves).

However, eventually, every code will get cracked—it may just take several hundred years, that’s all.

Below are three ciphers that were once considered unsolvable, but no more. Cryptanalysis wins!

Enigma, created: 1918

The German electrical engineer Arthur Scherbius patented his Enigma Machine, a mechanical cipher machine, in 1918, and it was soon adopted by German military forces. What made it so famously unbreakable is that the Enigma Machine uses electrical signals to concoct a new code every time a key is pressed, so it never uses the same code twice.

You can see why it was considered uncrackable.

Nevertheless, Enigma was broken by the WWII codebreakers of Bletchley Park, headed up by Alan Turing. Though it certainly it wasn’t an easy task, that’s for sure.

Vigenère Autokey, created: 1586

While the Enigma remained unbreakable for over 30 years, it’s nothing compared to the Vigenère Autokey’s 300 years. It was so safe a code, it was even nicknamed le chiffre indéchiffrable, or “the indecipherable cipher” to us English speakers.

The Vigenère uses polyalphabetic substitution (that means it really mixes the alphabet up), which makes it easy to use but really hard to break. This is in fact the same principle Enigma would use many years later.

However, in 1855, the inventor Charles Babbage came along and solved the Vigenère cipher for the English during the Crimean War. Because Babbage didn’t publish his work, the cipher continued to be used until 1863(!), when Friedrich Kasiski published his attack, rendering the Vigenère useless.

The Alberti Cipher, created: 1467

An even older once “unbreakable” code is the Alberti Cipher. This code was created by Leon Battista Alberti, and is the oldest known polyalphabetic cipher. (Are you seeing a pattern here?) Like the Enigma and the Vigenère, the Alberti Cipher uses metal discs that rotate to create a new code with every spin.

Alberti was dead certain his cipher was unbreakable, and although it took several centuries to prove him wrong, we now know that polyalphabetic ciphers can—and will eventually—be broken.

Try your own hand at codebreaking in one of our four escape games: http://bookeo.com/krakit.

5 Cryptography-centric TV Shows to Bend Your Escape-Game-Loving Mind

The four codebreakers of The Bletchley Circle

If there’s one thing all escape game fans can agree on, it’s their love of ciphers, codes, and the amazing feeling that comes with cracking one. A few television producers out there share that feeling, too.

While only one of these shows is still on the air, luckily we live in the age of streaming! And, who knows, if we all put in the effort and get the numbers just right, they might just bring them back for encore seasons. We have the power, cryptography-loving escape room fans!

1. The Bletchley Circle (2012–14)

Yep, that Bletchley, the same one where Alan Turing and his team cracked the “unbreakable” Enigma Code in WWII. This series is set after the end of the war in the early ’50s, centering on a group of women—former Bletchley codebreakers, of course—who take the solving of complex crimes into their own hands after the police fail to get the job done.

2. Numbers (2005–10)

FBI Special Agent Don Eppes skips the wiretapping and intimidation and goes straight for the numbers to solve a variety of crimes. His secret weapon? His super math genius brother, Charles, who uses equations (yes, equations!) to help find and apprehend the criminals. Yay, math!

3. Gravity Falls (2012–16)

In this animated series, Mabel Pines (Kristin Schaal) and her brother Dipper (Jason Ritter) spend their summer at their uncle’s house running “The Mystery Shack.” (The town of Gravity Falls happens to be full of paranormal creatures, so it’s sort of necessary.) At the end of every episode, there’s a different cipher to crack, introducing kids—and kids at heart!—to the Caesar, Atbash, and Vigenère ciphers, among others.

4. Touch (2012–13)

Former reporter Martin Bohm (played by Kiefer Sutherland) realizes his young son, Jake, who has been diagnosed as autistic, is an ace when it comes to numbers and patterns. So good, in fact, that he can predict the future based on what he sees within them. Jake uses his skills to decipher a number of codes that lead to the pair saving the day, naturally.

5. The Numbers Game (2013–)

Unlike the other shows in this list, The Numbers Game isn’t a drama or cartoon, but shows how numbers work in our everyday lives. Host Jake Porway (who looks like he could be Bill Nye’s long lost son, incidentally) delves into the history of codes and other brain-melting puzzles. Get ready for some codebreaking and silly skits to keep you entertained along the way.

Get your hands on all the ciphers and codes Krakit has to offer by booking a game in one of our four themed escape rooms, steps away from Lougheed SkyTrain in Burnaby. Book here.

Escape Game Forefathers: 4 Not-Famous but Very Famous Codebreakers and Codemakers

Lewis Carroll's Alphabet Cipher

In the long history of codebreaking, there are few highly famous codebreakers. Probably has something to do with the secrecy that surrounds cryptography … but we try not to focus on that here at Krakit Escape Game!

One of the best-known codebreakers of all time is definitely Alan Turing, who led the team at Bletchley Park (which was home to several other famous codebreakers) to break the Enigma Cipher. And though he may be fictional, Sherlock Holmes is another person that comes to mind when thinking of secret codes.

But along with these few famous cipher sleuths, there a whole host of non-famous cryptographers, who are, paradoxically, also quite famous.

1. Johnny Cash

That’s right—the Johnny Cash was no stranger to codes and ciphers. During his time in the United States Air Force, the future music icon was a Morse Code Intercept Operator for the Soviet Army. Basically, Johnny Cash eavesdropped on Russian spies. Now we know one of the reasons he was such a badass. We're also pretty sure he would've been a major horror escape game fan.

2. Lewis Carroll

The man who wrote Alice in Wonderland was a fan of riddles and tricks of logic, and he also developed his own cipher. The code he made was called the Alphabet Cipher, a simple polyalphabetic substitution that is nevertheless quite clever.

3. Charles Babbage

You may not be very familiar with his name, but you’re certainly very familiar with his work. Charles Babbage built the first successful automatic calculator and made scientific contributions that led directly to the computer. He also was a highly successful codebreaker—although this wasn’t known until a century after his death, due to the military keeping it hush-hush. Now Babbage is fully recognized for solving the Vigenère Cipher during the Crimean War.

4. Galileo Galilei

The man who confirmed that the earth went around the sun was also rather fond of making his own codes. Perhaps not surprising from a scientific mind such as his. He was also onto the fact that other people were aware of his brilliant brain—and probably wanted to steal his ideas. So, he simply coded his correspondence with other science geniuses, including Johannes Kepler. Problem solved.

Try your own hand at solving codes and other riddles at one of our four Vancouver escape games. Book here: http://bookeo.com/krakit.

Mystery, Intrigue, and Cryptology: 5 Codebreaking Books/Films for Escape Game Fans

Inferno, the third installment of director Ron Howard’s film version of the wildly successful Da Vinci Code book series, is due to hit theatres in just a few weeks. As most everyone knows—due to the massive phenomenon that was Dan Brown’s first novel back in 2003—the series centres on symbologist and general code nerd Robert Langdon, played by Tom Hanks in the films.

This got us thinking about what other codes and ciphers have gotten audiences as excited about cryptology as we are here at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game on an everyday basis.

While you’re waiting patiently for your codebreaking fix with Inferno (which is out October 28), here are five other book-to-film adaptations to check out in the meantime. Read the book, watch the movie—or do like us and do both. Plus don’t forget to try your own hand at cracking codes by playing an escape game.

1. Sherlock / The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Where would cryptology be in popular culture without Sherlock Holmes? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s no-nonsense detective has been cracking cases since 1887, when the first Sherlock novel, A Study in Scarlet, was published. And cryptology abounds in the BBC’s Sherlock series. For example, in the 2010 episode “The Blind Banker,” he and Watson investigate—and make cool—a cipher based on an ancient Chinese numeral system.

2. A Beautiful Mind

Like Inferno, A Beautiful Mind is directed by Ron Howard (the man must have a thing for intrigue). Unlike the Da Vinci Code series, however, this story is based on fact, not fiction: it narrativizes the life of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician and Nobel Laureate in Economics, whose obsession with patterns led him to cracking code for the Pentagon. Sylvia Nasar’s book, also called A Beautiful Mind, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

3. The Imitation Game / Alan Turing: The Enigma

Another true story of impressive mathematical feats, The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch (aka Sherlock Holmes), is based on the biography of Alan Turing. The logician and his team at Bletchley Park were responsible for cracking one of the hardest codes ever known—the Enigma cipher—which helped to end WWII.

4. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Like The Da Vinci Code, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has proven as popular in film form as in book form. Though this series isn’t as completely focused on codebreaking as some of the other entries on this list are, a cipher plays an important role in the mystery the main characters, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, must solve. In this case, they come in the form of extremely creepy encrypted Bible verses.

5. Zodiac

The director behind the US version of The Dragon Tattoo film, David Fincher, is also the man who took the story of cipher-loving serial murderer the Zodiac Killer to the big screen. Definitely one of the darkest cryptography-related stories out there, we recommend having a strong stomach when viewing or reading this one.

Book one of Krakit Vancouver Escape Game’s four themed escape rooms here: http://bookeo.com/krakit.

Escape Game History: The Art and Science of Cryptography

When you play escape rooms, there’s a good chance you’ll encounter a cryptography-based puzzle. Cryptography is the art of writing and solving codes—so you can see why it’s a favourite tool for the creators of escape games.

Although people have been writing codes to protect their secrets for literally thousands of years, cryptography as a science has only been around for about a century. That’s because it really took off during the World Wars. With a vast network of telephones and telegraphs and even carrier pigeons encircling the world, code writing suddenly took on global proportions during the Wars.

But we’re jumping ahead.

The first known use of a code goes way back, right to the ancient Egyptians and the tomb of the nobleman Khnumhotep II. Written around 1900 BCE in hieroglyphs (which proved to be their own code for Egyptologists to crack!), this burial script features symbols that don’t appear anywhere else in the language—intentionally obscuring the message.

The first use of encryption to deliver messages, however, is attributed to a man famous for many things: Caesar. The army general used a simple substitution cipher to send encrypted messages to his top men at the front. Known as the Casear cipher, this code shifts the letters of the alphabet over three, so “A” is written as “D” and “B” as “E” and so on.

It’s not the toughest code to crack, is it? That’s why, when electricity started making automated codes easier, there arose intensely complicated ciphers, such as the famous Enigma code of WWII. Any cipher becomes a race between the codemaker and the codebreaker, and in the case of war, crypotography plays a life and death role.

Information sent through wires continues to be encrypted (including the messages you send from your computer), making cryptography a daily part of our modern lives—and not just when we’re playing an escape room.

However, remember that escape games don’t take a degree in cryptography to crack. Any single puzzle definitely isn’t meant to take up all of your time, so if it’s starting to do that, you’re probably overthinking it. More than likely, the puzzle is of the Caesar variety rather than the Enigma.

Try your hand at the codebreaking at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game by booking a spot here: http://bookeo.com/krakit.

Ingenuity, Charm, and Mystery: The Greatest Codes in History

The history of codebreaking isn’t just filled with mathematics and ciphers. And neither is it populated only by spies in trenchcoats and trilby hats. It also involves a whole lot of ingenuity, charm, and surprise—and even a whole bunch of regular, non-spy folks, who just happen to have a thing for brainy puzzles (much like us here at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game!).

Below we look at some of the most fascinating codes in human history, whether they have been long solved or are still keeping us guessing.

Edward Elgar's Dorabella Cipher

The Enigma

The reason that the Enigma code from World War II—recently recounted in the movie The Imitation Game (2014)—is such a famous cipher is not because it is unbroken, but because it has been solved. And by no easy means. The amount of ingenuity required by Alan Turing and his Bletchley Park team to crack the code was astounding, with the very real goal of saving human lives and ending the war.

The Dorabella Cipher

The stakes of cracking the Dorabella Cipher are nowhere near as high as they were for the Enigma team. In fact, by comparison, the story of the Dorabella Cipher is positively charming.

English composer and code-enthusiastic Edward Elgar is the cryptographer behind this 87-character message, written for his friend Dora Penny (who he called Dorabella). Penny claimed never to have been able to solve the message, and its contents remain a mystery to this day. However, some codebreakers say the reason for this is because it’s not a message at all, but a coded composition. (Makes sense!)

Cicada 3301

Not strictly a code, the mystery of Cicada 3301 instead involves a set of puzzles that have been unleashed upon the public once per year since 2012 (or, almost once per year: there was no puzzle in 2015). According to Cicada 3301, the reason for the puzzles—which heavily feature cryptography and computer programming—is to recruit codebreakers from the general public. Recruit them for what, exactly, is not clear.

For more codebreaking hijinks, check out our posts on the Kryptos Sculpture at the CIA, the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, and the ciphers of the Zodiac Killer.

Or, even better, get your very own brain in code-cracking mode at one of our four escape rooms by booking here: http://bookeo.com/krakit

Bring Out the Big Brains: Code-Breakers and Logicians

Alan Turing, owner of a big, big brain

As far as code-breakers go, there is none more famous these days than Alan Turing. The man who finally broke the unbreakable WWII code, Enigma, in secrecy at Bletchley Park waited a long time for his due props. The code-breaking operation wasn’t declassified until the 1970s—two decades after Turing’s tragic death.

Turing’s powers of logic and brilliant mathematical mind now rightfully sits in history as one of the most impressive the world has ever seen. But he isn’t the only logician to have wowed the rest of us with their humongous brain. Below are three others who sit in good—although incredibly rare—company with Turing.

Akṣapāda Gautama

Gautama, who lived in the 2nd century CE, was such a fan of logic that he just, y’know, founded logical philosophy in Indian. He wrote the Nyāya Sūtras, the founding text of this branch of philosophy, which sets out the steps to achieving “valid knowledge” through logical tests.

In a nutshell, Gautama created a path to spiritual enlightenment through cleverness. Not bad for a life’s work.

George Dantzig

This may sound like a familiar story: Dantzig, running late for class one day, enters the lecture theatre and sees two problems on the board. He copies them down for homework, and—after turning them in late—learns he just solved two “unsolvable” problems in statistics.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck later nabbed Dantzig’s story for Good Will Hunting. But in reality Dantzig was indeed a student (a PhD at that), not a janitor.

Lewis Carroll

Yep—that Lewis Carroll: the one who wrote Alice in Wonderland. While there are many theories about the children’s book being a metaphor for a psychotropic drug trip, it isn’t a stretch to say that maybe Carroll just had one weird brain.

Though remembered as an author, Carroll was also a mathematics professor at Oxford whose pastimes included devising logic puzzles and riddles. He included one in Alice, which became one of the most famous unanswerable riddles of all time: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

Don’t worry though—While solving Krakit’s four escape rooms definitely takes some brainpower, you won’t need a Turing machine to crack them.