Book Codes

Book codes are much harder to crack, because there is no logical order in the encoded material. Each personthe one sending the message and the one reading ithas a copy of the same book. What book it is doesn't matter at all, but the two copies must be identical. There would be no point in just agreeing to use "Alice in Wonderland", for instance, because that book has been printed many times and, although the words may be the same each time, they will almost certainly occur on different pages. The books have to be absolutely identical. The message is written as a series of long numbers. The encoder turns to a page anywhere in the book and finds the letter that's needed. It might be "a". The person finds the word "darkness", which happens to be the seventh word on the fifteenth line on page two hundred and forty-one. The code for "a" will then be 2411572, made up of page 241, line 15, word 7, letter 2. The next time an "a" is needed a different page and word will be used, so that no-one can see a pattern in the coded text. This sort of code must be rather boring to write and frustrating to decode. Nevertheless, skilled cryptographers can work out messages written even in this complicated way.

Dictionary Code: Each person that will be coding and decoding will need to have same edition of the same copy of the dictionary or any book. To encode use numbers instead of words. Example: 16, 7 means page 16 the seventh word/ or letter.

Dictionary
2. Another approach is to use a dictionary as the codebook. This guarantees that nearly all words will be found, and also makes it much easier to find a word when encoding. This approach was used by George Scovell for the Duke of Wellington's army in some campaigns of the Peninsular War. In Scovell's method, a codeword would consist of a number (indicating the page of the dictionary), a letter (indicating the column on the page), and finally a number indicating which entry of the column was meant. However, this approach also has a disadvantage: because entries are arranged in alphabetical order, so are the code numbers. This can give strong hints to the cryptanalyst unless the message is superenciphered. The wide distribution and availability of dictionaries also present a problem; it is likely that anyone trying to break such a code is also in possession of the dictionary which can be used to read the message.

Bible Cipher
The Bible is a widely available book that is almost always printed with chapter and verse markings making it easy to find a specific string of text within it, making it particularly useful for this purpose.

How to Encode and Decode Using a Bible Cipher

Print this article Related Searches: A message that uses the Bible to code a message is a Bible cipher. The Bible is a great book to encode and decode from because of its length and number of words. Ciphers are fun to use to create secret messages. Difficulty: Easy

Instructions
Things You'll Need Bible Bible concordance or online database

1 Decide on the version of the Bible and the code for the titles of the books of the bible with the person trading messages with you. For example, use letters for the books. Use "A" for Genesis, "B" for Exodus, "AA" for Daniel and "AAA" for 1 Timothy. Numbers instead of the books' titles work too. 2 Use a Bible concordance or an online database to find specific words. The Bible Gateway website lets you search any word or phrase in 50 versions of the bible. This allows you to find the words in specific verses for your cipher. 3 Write the message out on a piece of paper. Skip every other line on the paper. This gives you space to write the verses the words are located in. 4 Look up each word in the Bible concordance or database to find the verses. Count the words in the verse up to the word you are looking for. 5 Write each location under the word. For example, if using the King James Bible, looking for the word created. It may look like this: A1-1 5. 6 Decode each message received with the same cipher. For example AR2-23 18 the word is "hands."

Security
Essentially, the code version of a "book cipher" is just like any other code, but one in which the trouble of preparing and distributing the codebook has been eliminated by using an existing text. However this means, as well as being attacked by all the usual means employed against other codes or ciphers, partial solutions may help the cryptanalyst to guess other codewords, or even to completely break the code by identifying the key text. This is, however, not the only way a book cip her may be b roken. It is still susceptible to o ther method s of cryp tanalysis, and as such is quite easily broken, even without sophsitcated means, without the cryp tanalist having any idea what bo ok the cipher is keyed to.[1][ page needed] If used carefully, the cipher version is probably much stronger, because it acts as a homophonic cipher with an extremely large number of equivalents. However, this is at the cost of a very large ciphertext expansion. In the context of espionage, a bo ok cip her h as a c onsidera ble adva ntag e for an ag ent in enem y territory . A conventional codebook, if discovered by the local authorities, instantly incriminates the holder as a spy and gives the authorities the chance of deciphering the code and sending false messages impersonating the agent. On the other ha nd a book, if chosen ca refully to fit with the spy's cover story, wou ld seem entirely innoc uous.

Examples
A famous use of a book cipher is in the Beale ciphers, of which document no. 2 uses a (variant printing of) the United States Declaration of Independence as the key tex t. Richard S org e's spy ring in Japan used a book cipher which the Japanese were unable to cryptanalyze even after capturing both Sorge and his radio operator / code clerk. It used an edition of a statistical handbook of Germany as the key tex t. In the American Revolution, Ben edict A rnold used a book cipher, sometimes known as the Arnold Cipher, which used S ir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England as a key text.

In fiction
In "The Valley of Fear", Sherlock Holmes decrypts a message enciphered with a book cipher by deducing which book had been used as a key text. The nam e of Ken Follet's World Wa r II thriller The Key to Rebecca refers to a German spy in Cairo using Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca as the basis o f a code. In A P resum ption of Death, Lord Peter Wimsey, on assignment for British Intelligence in WWII Nazi-occupied Europe, uses a co de based on th e wo rks of John Donne. The Germans, suspecting that an intelligence service in which Oxonians have a major role would choose a classical work of English literature, systematically try such works until hitting the right one and breaking the code, coming near to catching the spy. W imsey then improvises a ne w co de, based on a n un pub lished text known on ly to him self and his w ife. Graham Greene's protagonists often use book codes. In The Human Factor, several books are used, and an edition of Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespea re is used in Our Man in Havana. A book cipher plays an importan t role in th e TV version of Sharpe's Swo rd. The key text is Voltaire's Candide. In the 2004 film Nation al Treasu re, an Ottendorf cipher is discovered on the back of the U. S. Declaration of Independence, using the "Silence Dogood" letters a s the ke y text. The protagonists of the Ma tthew Reilly novel The Six Sacred Stones used a book cipher to send confidential messages to each other. The key text was the Harry Potter boo ks, bu t the m essag es were sent via a The Lord of the Rings forum to make the key text harder to identify. In Lost: Mystery of the Island, a series of four jigsaw puzzles released in 2007, Ottendorf cipher was used on each puzzle's box to hide spoilers and reveal information about the show to the fans.

"T he Fisher King", a two-part episode of Criminal Minds, features an Ottendorf cipher brought to the Beh avioral Analysis Un it by the UNSUB via A gen t Hotchner's wife. T he cy phe r was part of a larger p uzzle to find a girl who ha d been missing for tw o years. Th e key text wa s The Collector by John Fowles. Burn Notice (episo des " W here T here's Sm oke" and "Ce nter of the Storm ", 20 10): Michael W esten steals a B ible from a safe deposit box that is the code book of Simon. This becomes part of the season plot to track an organization starting wars for p rofit as M ichael tries to arra nge an interview with Simon. In the film Unknown (201 1), Pro f. Bressler's passwords are ob scure d by an O ttendorf cipher. In The Un it episode "Para dise Lost", Jonas Blane (aka Snake Doctor) uses a book code from the poem Para dise Lost to comm unicate to his wife, Mo lly, that he has arrived safely in Panama