Source : elonka
This is an unofficial list of well-known unsolved codes and ciphers. A couple of the better-known unsolved ancient historical scripts are also thrown in, since they tend to come up during any discussion of unsolved codes. There has also been an attempt to sort this list by "fame", as defined by a loose formula involving the number of times that a particular cipher has been written about, and/or how many hits it pulls up on a moderately-sorted web search.
Famous Unsolved Codes and Ciphers with links :cool2:
Quoting a few :
Chinese "Gold Bar" ciphers - In 1933, seven gold bars were allegedly issued to a General Wang in Shanghai, China. These gold bars appear to represent metal certificates related to a bank deposit with a U.S. Bank. The gold bars themselves have pictures, Chinese writing, some form of script writing, and cryptograms in latin letters.
RSA Challenges - There are a number of modern computer-based challenges, including several factoring challenges from RSA Labs that have implications for the strength of public-key systems, and some equivalently difficult elliptic curve challenges, also relating to public-key cracking (check here for Bruce Schneier's high-math analysis of the RSA/Elliptic Curve debate). As of this writing, the most recently-cracked RSA Challenge was in November 2005, when RSA-640, a 193-digit number, was successfully factored (which won a $20,000 prize). There are several more on the list, with prizes up to $200,000, which have not yet been cracked. Many fly-by-night snake-oil crypto companies also put out challenges that are arguably famous because the media sometimes pick up the challenge uncritically, but they are usually not worth mentioning on this list.
Indus Script - The Indus Valley civilization flourished around 2600 to 1800 BC on the Indian sub-continent, leaving behind thousands of objects inscribed with a pictographic script that seems to have been composed of about 400 signs. A great deal of work has been done on analyzing the messages that are available, but to this date the script still has not been deciphered.
Richard Feynman's Challenge Ciphers - In 1987, someone posted a message to an internet cryptology list, saying that Caltech Physics Professor Richard Feynman was given three samples of code by a fellow scientist at Los Alamos. Only one of the three was ever solved.
This is an unofficial list of well-known unsolved codes and ciphers. A couple of the better-known unsolved ancient historical scripts are also thrown in, since they tend to come up during any discussion of unsolved codes. There has also been an attempt to sort this list by "fame", as defined by a loose formula involving the number of times that a particular cipher has been written about, and/or how many hits it pulls up on a moderately-sorted web search.
Famous Unsolved Codes and Ciphers with links :cool2:
Quoting a few :
Chinese "Gold Bar" ciphers - In 1933, seven gold bars were allegedly issued to a General Wang in Shanghai, China. These gold bars appear to represent metal certificates related to a bank deposit with a U.S. Bank. The gold bars themselves have pictures, Chinese writing, some form of script writing, and cryptograms in latin letters.
RSA Challenges - There are a number of modern computer-based challenges, including several factoring challenges from RSA Labs that have implications for the strength of public-key systems, and some equivalently difficult elliptic curve challenges, also relating to public-key cracking (check here for Bruce Schneier's high-math analysis of the RSA/Elliptic Curve debate). As of this writing, the most recently-cracked RSA Challenge was in November 2005, when RSA-640, a 193-digit number, was successfully factored (which won a $20,000 prize). There are several more on the list, with prizes up to $200,000, which have not yet been cracked. Many fly-by-night snake-oil crypto companies also put out challenges that are arguably famous because the media sometimes pick up the challenge uncritically, but they are usually not worth mentioning on this list.
Indus Script - The Indus Valley civilization flourished around 2600 to 1800 BC on the Indian sub-continent, leaving behind thousands of objects inscribed with a pictographic script that seems to have been composed of about 400 signs. A great deal of work has been done on analyzing the messages that are available, but to this date the script still has not been deciphered.
Richard Feynman's Challenge Ciphers - In 1987, someone posted a message to an internet cryptology list, saying that Caltech Physics Professor Richard Feynman was given three samples of code by a fellow scientist at Los Alamos. Only one of the three was ever solved.