BSidesCharm - 2017 - Robert Weiss - The Cryptography of Edgar Allan Poe

started so uh edgar allan poe's only full-length novel he wrote mostly short stories was a book called the narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket it was published in 1838 and it's a seafaring tale and many think that um it sort of became a precursor or a guide for melville's moby dick which is published in 1851. poe loved to tell people that the uh that the novel was uh was true um of course it was not um and it's uh like uh not unlike moby dick um it includes a group of characters who go through a whole series of sailing and seafaring adventures and one of these adventures um four of the characters find themselves on a

uh on a lifeboat after they've been shipwrecked at sea and they um uh they're running short of provisions so they cap they capture a uh turtle and uh they eat it um but they realize you know we still don't have enough food and uh um you know rescue could be far off so they decide to draw straws to see who they're going to kill um on the boat they're going to kill someone and eat that person so that's their plan and they do draw straws and the loser is a character named richard parker now uh about 45 years later a boat yacht leaves england for sydney australia and the yacht is not really meant for

ocean going so shock spoiler alert the yacht sinks and four of the um four of the people on the yacht make it into a lifeboat and they capture a turtle and eat it for provisions but realizing that they're probably not going to make it they consider drawing straws they decide not to because one of the people has fallen overboard drank some sea water in order to quench his thirst and um he's gotten very sick so the other three decide the best course of action would be to kill that person but they have to kill him otherwise you know if they wait for him to die you know his blood's going to be spoiled and the meat's not going to be

good so to be of any value to the other three um they have to kill him so they stab him in the neck with a pen knife and drink his blood and eat them and we know this because three days later the other three are rescued and there's a big court case because they're tried for murder um of this uh this other guy and they uh and it's a very famous court case because their defense is for the charge of murder as necessity you know it was necessary for us to kill this person and prior to this court case um again which is very famous english common law court case there was no um this was not a defense

and they are in fact found guilty and given the death penalty but later it's commuted to um time served and uh so they end up only getting about six months um but uh uh so again with the details of what happened to the yacht the mignonette not in dispute totally true well known the guy they killed richard parker so uh now in um now in the book the the narrative of sir arthur uh gordon pim of nantucket there was a uh a ship's dog right and the dog was named tiger and one of the reasons that this book is sort of not really well known it's not maybe not poe's best work there's a lot

of loose ends and one of the loose ends is you know after the ship goes down and you know the four people are on the on the lifeboat like what happened to the dog right it's like no one knows the dog has never heard from again it's not mentioned later on it doesn't come back he doesn't die just just loose ends nothing happens um but in uh in 2001 a person named yuck excuse me john martell writes a book called life of pi and that one you've all seen racing the movie heard about this book right and in that book of course the lead character pie is stuck in a lifeboat with a tiger the name of the tiger

richard parker okay um so anyway uh who am i uh my name is p.w crack i'm a principal security engineer with war collar industries penetration tester red teamer one of the defcon speaker goons i'm obviously a member of all that stuff co-chair besides dc i'm gonna walk you through a little story today maybe learn a little bit about crypto history and a little bit about baltimore history and we'll have some fun uh so who was poe born in 1809 obviously he was considered he's the founder of detective fiction he wrote that so if you all remember that that story that you've all heard a million times you know it's like someone's murdered everyone you know

close the doors we're all stuck in the room the detective comes in and says one of you is guilty and we're going to figure out who so poe did that first right he was also contributed a lot and was very interested in the early science fiction genre which was just coming out at that time and he spent most of his adult life here in baltimore he's the poe museum is about a mile and a half from here um his grave site where he was moved to is about half a mile from here um his they moved his grave uh shortly after his death um and um uh let's see in 1844 uh poe wrote a short story which was

published in the sun newspaper called the balloon you may also see you may also know another story that's somewhat like this it was about a transatlantic voyage by hot air balloon the sun published it and two days later had to retract the story because everyone thought it was true so if you think about jules verne's you know around the world in 80 days right starts up with a hot air balloon across the atlantic so same type of thing here right um poe was one of the things that was a different about poe was he was one of the first writers to ever try to make a living writing so he wrote things that he thought would

be not only popular but profitable and he worked as a writer full time so he edited magazines and he worked as a you know he was doing this all the time for his entire adult life and that's a little bit different than a lot of other writers so when this thing got published in the sun the sun made a lot of money they published they sold a lot of newspapers and poe didn't get a sent so he ended up having a lifelong hatred of the sun which is a tradition we keep going in baltimore to this day so uh so uh let's see what else uh he he's uh a lot of people don't know he went to

west point and while he was at west point he published uh he published a book of uh of stories and poems which got some some popularity and he realized he probably wasn't cut out to be in the military um he was fond of telling the other cadets there that he uh that his grandfather was the notorious uh trader benedict arnold are you like i want you to think about a guy who goes to west point and tells all of his friends he was like hey my my grandfather was benedict arnold i was like what are you gonna like kill the guy so uh but he was fond of doing that and uh of course that was also not true and um

uh realizing that he was sort of stuck in west point at this point he had to come up with a way to get um to get out so he stopped attending chapel and uh that was a rule at west point you had to go to chapel every sunday so eventually he was court-martialed and thrown out of west point which of course was his exactly his point right he was he wanted to be thrown out um the period of time that we're going to discuss in terms of cryptography is roughly 1839-1841 going to go into that a little bit more detail in 1839 the daguerreotype is uh is invented so the the daguerreotype is sort of a silver process it's a

precursor to what you'd call photography on a negative type thing um and uh but i think at that point in time people you know sort of fascinated by the process but they i don't think they really knew kind of where it was going um so this picture on the right of edgar allan poe is one of the earliest daguerreotypes and sort of one of the earliest things that you would call a photograph that you would ever have seen and i don't think edgar allan poe could have conceived that we'd be looking at this thing 200 years later um he certainly didn't put his best effort into it and uh so he was distraught over the death

of his wife and he tried to commit suicide by ingesting a large amount large amount of opiates uh and uh and then four days later set for that picture so it was sort of like that guy in school you know and knows the picture days coming up and doesn't even bother combing his hair you know that morning so like uh this is again not his best work but i don't think he was really thinking that this is that would be the image that we would remember him by um but unfortunately it is um so poem cryptography poe was fascinated by cryptography and um in his in his day everything was written right if you wanted to to summon the

police department you would typically write a note and give it to somebody who would go to the police department and bring them the note saying i need help and so everything was written all communications were done in writing and if you wanted anything to be kept private you had to come up with some sort of secret message or secret way of um of making sure that your messages were private and can only be read by you so this was a con this was commonly done and it was the type of thing that people did all the time they just didn't really have any kind of a methodology for doing it properly right so any type of secure secret writing had

not really been invented yet um and poe does in fact turn out to be and you'll sort of see how this progresses but it turns out to be one of the first people to have sort of a process for decrypting these things right so it's not just brute forcing it trying to figure out and then aha i got it but he was applying a rigorous process not only to decrypting it but you'll sort of see some of the other stuff that he's able to do

so here's a quick example of sort of secret writing this is a poem that was it's a poe poem but it was published after his death a couple years after he died and um it's titled an enigma and it contains a piece of secret writing which nobody would wouldn't be totally obvious looking at it reading it so i'm going to line it up for you and highlight it um and if you look at the first letter of the first sentence the second letter of the second sentence the third letter of the third sentence and so on um those letters spell out sarah anna lewis and that's a picture of her on the right she would have been a contemporary

opposed she lived in baltimore she was also a poet and he wrote this this particular poem for her and encoded her name into it now this is the kind of thing that we would look at and say it was like oh you probably learned how to do that in like fifth grade right you know it's like we would teach elementary kids how to do this type of thing um you know when poe did it let's put this way we teach kids that because poe did it right and it's like this is the first time so this was a big deal back then um so the story sort of kicks off in 1839 and poe is working

as a editor for alexander's magazine and again remember he he works doing writing tasks because that is his full-time job and he needs to work he's not wealthy he needs to work in order to uh to make money and uh someone sends a letter to the editor to alexander's magazine um which ends up with poe and he says hey i have this riddle uh you know a riddle would be the thing is like what's you know red and green and black all over type that kind of construction hey have this riddle and i can't solve it so he sends it into poe and poe says uh yeah so okay the answer to the riddle is this

right um the riddle is poor right he he doesn't he doesn't think it's a very good riddle the riddle should the word play of the riddle should be sort of fairly tight poe doesn't like this particular riddle he thinks it's badly constructed and he says it was obviously written by a um and and then he gives 25 other riddles in the uh the return letter to the editor that he publishes and um and in the very small footnote at the bottom of this thing poe writes this he says basically look if you're replacing letters for other letters in terms of secret writing you don't really need to replace them with letters you could replace them with any symbol

right a letter is just another symbol and i can still read it so for instance replace um a with that sign and b with an asterisk and c with something else and so on and so on and i could still decrypt it and read that message so he's describing a single substitution cipher and he says uh um i can i can have i have a methodology for doing this and let's put it to the test right send me send me something um and uh we'll see what happens so two weeks later nothing happens and one month later someone sends this in and says okay here you go i would be i'd be amused to see if you can decrypt

this and uh poe obliges and includes the solution and says you know no problem here's the riddle here's the answer and uh that you encrypted and by the way the answer to the riddle is temperance and uh and that's it's all good so in the very next issue two weeks later someone sends in another thing and says [Music] uh sends in the hieroglyphics poe publishes that that middle paragraph is the the solution uh pope published the solution he says i can't publish the cryptex because it was too ugly right here's the symbols that were used i have no type for in the shop right so i can't it's not that i don't want to publish the crypt text i literally don't

have any way to publish the crypt text um but the writer has said you know it's like if you if you're successful in decrypting this we sure love to know how you did it right what what's your secret so he says the writer says in a note just let us into the secret as we are fond of the marvelous well well what will he give us for the secret it is a wonderful one and worth paying for let him send us a list of 40 subscribers with the money and we will give him the full explanation of the whole method of proceeding uh so poe says you know it's like hey i'm not gonna tell you for free you

gotta give me 40 subscribers in the same issue another person replies with this particular piece of cryptex and poe also provides the solution and in the very next issue again another two weeks later another subscriber sends in that up top and poe decrypts it and provides the solution there you guys know a poser is a pretender right so it was like another word for some a faker right um and uh so this is another one uh post says uh the subscriber says uh sent in this hieroglyphical puzzle um says you know we can't even publish it um and it says uh if you can't decipher it will you at least have the candor to admit it

right and poe replies of course we shall have the candor to say no such thing for the translation is below all right and uh if you uh if you have he says he i may have another one that's more difficult and poe says you know send it on right um so i post seems like a kind of guy who would fit in very well in our audience right go ahead yeah right because they're they're using physical movable type at that point right so there's no photo type setting yeah so so if i don't have a type that represents the thing that you wrote but the writing by the way is coming in at handwriting so on paper

they're handwriting out various symbols and so some of them he can't represent in in printed paper correct yeah you can't uh you can't that would involve literally melting lead right at that point so uh yeah so so so some of them he tries to do um so yeah so we send it on we reply right so he's he's challenging and goading the uh the readers right um uh so two months later uh poe replies uh you know gives us a little editorial about our late puzzles right or the puzzles that we've been talking about and uh and in it he says you know it's like we have this dilemma right um he's been accused of setting up

his own challenges right you know it's like the the messages that he's printing that he's literally making them up himself and um and if he stops decrypting things for people he'll be accused of not being able to right but the alternative is that he has to keep decrypting them forever you know so he ends up writing is like do people really think that we have nothing in the world better to do than to read hieroglyphics and that we're going to stop our ordinary business to set up for conjurers will anybody tell us how to get out of this dilemma right he realizes you know he's like uh you know i challenged hackers and i may

have you know screwed up so not good um but you know in the uh in the next issue he says you know it's like hey this is this may be the hardest one that i've received yet right he gets this one they've concatenated all the words together and um and he says uh and and also rather than being a single substitution cipher some of the characters stand for different charac letters in different places at different times right so he says this one was exceedingly difficult but of course he covers the solution anyway and it's another riddle right so um so he's making uh making some progress uh and then in that same issue he publishes this um now that obviously the

highlighting and the italics are mine right he publishes this and um i want to call your attention to in the second line there's a word that's spelled v-s-m-u-k-k-s-s right so he says look this is a fraud this is not a cryptogram right or it doesn't it doesn't follow the rules that were set out for the challenge and he says because there is no word in english language that has two double letters at the end of it like that now that's not exact that is what he wrote but that's not exactly true um what is true is there is no word in the english language with two double letters at the end that is eight characters long right so

coffee toffee tattoo a series of other words that committee also end with two double letters but there is no letter there is no word in english that has eight characters that ends with two double letters so he says look just on the basis of that one word i can tell you right off the bat this is not a single substitution cipher and it doesn't qualify for the contest but poe goes a little bit further he says look at the look at the word that begins mw there's a limited number of two letter words in the english language and therefore there's a limited number of possibilities for what m could be and what w could be then look at the word mlw

which has three obviously three letter characters in it given all of the possibilities for m and all the possibilities for w there's now a very limited number of possibilities for three letter words with m's and potential w's that make a word and therefore l can only be a very small subset of things then you've got the the word that begins l-a-a-m we know that there's a small list of m's there's an even smaller list of l's he says but there are no words that have any of those l's with any of those m's that have two double letters in the middle so poe's not just calling this thing a fraud he is in a in a procedural way demonstrating

why it cannot be a legitimate single substitution cipher so again i i guess the point here is i'm trying to lay out is there's a process going on here right and poe is one of the first people to ever be sort of executing this kind of process so in the in the very next uh very next issue he clears up a couple of others um that the top line is decrypted as that third line there's another one and another decryption same type of thing these are all single substitution ciphers and in beginning of april there's another another sample from another reader exactly well done and uh and and poe decrypts that as well uh you know not not a problem on any of

these and then in late april um i included this one as well this is submitted now let me catch up in my cards here a second yeah um and that decrypt says you know binghamton broome county new york your friend henry um but um but what i wanted to point out is like so you've seen that this guy has this kind of process right and you've seen kind of the hieroglyphics that he's decrypted up till this point right and all of the readers are kind of following along with this whole process which has been going on for about five months at this point this guy sends in he encrypts b as two right i as nine

n is fourteen it's literally just the number of the placement of the character in the alphabet right and this is like supposed to stump poe like what what were you thinking right this guy fails completely right here of course it gets decrypted but i just thought it was a this is a particularly weak attempt um also from the same issue uh that one gets sent in and is again decrypted and uh and that is it for for alexander's magazine right that that was sort of the whole run of encryptions and decryptions there are a couple of others that poe publishes the um the decryptions but he can't publish the encryptions uh there's a couples that he says are

frauds but basically uh that was it for about five months alexander's magazine and and we're done right and i was like okay so dilemma resolved i'm just not going to do that anymore and we're all good so again that takes five months from december of 1839 to uh april of uh 1840. so it's about 1841 and poe is working as an editor for two other magazines that eventually get combined into a magazine which is now called grams magazine and poe is writing a literary critique of a book called sketches of conspicuous living characters of france and in it in this book written by somebody else there's this discussion of the duchess of berry is sending a coded message to her

supporters in france and one of her ministers gets the message but doesn't get the key so he can't decrypt it and the authors of this book say but he was so smart that he was you know he had a penetrating mind right he was able to decrypt this message without the key now poe cannot let this go right um and he says basically he was like look you don't need to be a genius to do this right like i did this right it was like you don't have to be this is not a point where you need to have such a penetrating mind right so in his discussion in his review of this book he basically throws up this again it's a

little note basically saying you know look the fact that it was in french really doesn't have anything to do with the issue right it could be in french italian spanish german latin greek doesn't make any difference or any of the dialects i could still decrypt this and if anyone uh wants to afford themselves some amusement from the experiment let them try it right so again bring it on and uh in the next issue of graham's magazine he publishes um some a few words on secret writing so let me get caught up so a few words on secret writing starts off as mostly a um a white paper on cryptography poe writes um a series of ways

that you might start off trying to encrypt or hide the messages and then shows why each one of those would not be secure and describes in fact the method for breaking all of those different types of codes so he's pretty much going and saying like you could try a but a would not be secure you could try b but b would not be secure and so on down the line um and uh he then also gets a submission uh from one of the readers in response to his footnote on the conspicuous uh french thing and some of the readers one of the readers writes in and says well one way you could do it would be

this and i give you two samples one easy and one hard so this is the easy one capture that for a second and then this is the hard one

now the po decrypts and the uh the key phrase for the easy one was in english and the key phrase for the difficult one was in latin and the difficult one is that one and poe provides the decryptions as well he says the first one decoded the key phrase was a word to the wise is sufficient and on the second post says this one was very difficult the key phrase was soviter in moto fortier in re which is latin for pleasantly in manner powerfully indeed and obviously if i was able to decrypt this that latin phrase on the second one is said to be dwight eisenhower's motto by the way pleasantly in manor powerfully indeed

and i just wanted to mention also again we're in baltimore this is maryland um does anyone know what the motto of maryland is so it is uh fatimah parole feminine which is italian for uh strong deeds gentle words so the the the key for this is very similar in latin to the motto of maryland which is in italian but anyway it's a little sidebar um so the next the next month uh poe publishes um secret writing part two it's gonna be a four part series um and uh i'm sorry it ends up being a four part series i don't think poe actually intends it at any given point in time that i'm going to write four

parts right but there are four so for those of you playing along at home um so he gets a new sample submitted by a gentleman named thomas that's the new sample and pose solves this but he decides that he's not going to print the solution yet he says wouldn't it be interesting if we let the readers try to decrypt this themselves so he offers a surprise one a one year subscription to grams magazine as well as a one year subscription to uh saturday evening post for the first person to write in with a solution to the thomas cryptogram um he also mentions by the way there was another another submission that was a fraud it

contained the encryption aaa and poe replies you know look people you're not even trying you know there's no word in english that has two of the same letter so we're not going to try that one so that was a secret writing part two and he sort of challenges the readers back so now in in secret writing part three um he publishes the solution uh so that's the solution to the thomas cryptogram uh because he doesn't hear from anyone the key was but find this out and i give up and he also publishes the full letter from the guy who submitted it from thomas saying how amazed and stunned he is that they were able to he

was able to decrypt this and then you get to secret writing number four so this is again 1841 and this secret writing part 4 includes a brill it's the last installment it includes a brilliant letter from a gentleman named wb tyler and wb tyler makes four points he says first of all cryptography is of general interest right this is not a parlor trick it's not a game and it's not something that you know we're doing here for fun um cryptography and secret writing rate is actually important right which if you look at it sort of with 150 years back right obviously he's dead on on that right that he says look this is actually has some meaningful is meaningful in our

lives um he also says to poe that poe's opinion that um that you can't create a secure cipher he says it's not sufficiently supported right it is the case that no one has a secure cipher right now but he says but you haven't proven that it can't be done uh and then he he conjectures that um that if i encrypted the words if i if i flip the words backwards so i encrypted um t-e-h as e-h-t and then substituted letters for that and got rid of the spaces that we might be pretty close to a little bit more secure he said that would fun to make fundamentally make it more difficult and if you remember

there's an earlier cryptogram in alexander's where one of the people has done that and poe said it that was in fact exceedingly difficult um so tyler provides this is the first example all right and and he has said like t-e-h-e-h-t backwards get rid of the spaces he's kind of told you what he's going to do [Music] tyler also submits this as a potentially more difficult cryptogram uh and uh also in the same secret writing part four poe replies back to him and poe says perhaps no good cipher was invented which its originator did not conceive insoluble yet so far as yet so far no impenetrable cryptograph has been discovered in other words when you create a cryptograph you always

think it's good right you can't think that anyone else would come up with a way of breaking it and yet they always do right there's probably secret writing number four probably the first known instance of never roll your own crypto um so so this is tyler's second one and this is going to be i'm going to leave this up here for just a second right this is probably one of the most famous cryptograms of history so both of those cryptograms the tyler the two tyler cryptograms are um are unsolved for over 150 years uh poe says uh he's not going to solve them he's already decided that he's out of the cryptogram business and he's

not going to attempt to do any more um he leaves it up to the readers to go ahead and try it if they'd like but um but that's it he's not he's not going to do it [Music] uh uh also in secret writing part four uh poe acknowledges that another reader a guy named richard bolton did in fact solve the cryptogram from the first secret writing the thomas cryptogram but the letter didn't get to poe in time before he published the solution in secret writing three so um so he acknowledges that richard bolton has solved it and gives him the prize um he also uh sends bolton a letter and in this letter he says uh

he tells bolton you know congratulations you know you solve the the other cryptogram you'll notice in the upcoming issue there's two cryptograms from this other guy um tyler he says that don't trouble yourself with uh with those with those cryptograms right they are insoluble insoluble for the reason that is merely type in pi or something near it i was absent from the office for a short time i didn't see a proof and the type compositors have made a complete medley of it so it's not even a remote resemblance to the original message you know probably would have been good to tell everyone that but he tells one guy like in another state so um so the bolton letter kind of tells

you and and this letter survives right we know that he wrote this because that letter is still out there somewhere so um uh so those two tyler cryptograms don't get solved for over 150 years right and in fact they don't get solved when you kind of know there's typos in the cryptograms and bolton i'm sorry not bolton tyler has told you what he's going to do right he's told you how he's going to encrypt it and what he was thinking when he did it um so uh let me go back so they don't get solved until so they're both published on a site called the alanka site has anyone ever heard of the alanka site

sort of a site for famous unsolved cryptograms um i remember going to the site a long time ago as well it's definitely been up for uh over 20 years and um uh they don't get solved until the first one gets solved roughly early 90s so in 1991 a gentleman named terrace terence whalen writes a thesis and in his thesis he was he solves the first one the first tyler cryptogram but the thesis isn't published until 1994 and um in the interim another person named john hodgson um solves it in 1993 so basically because of the publishing thing you've got two guys simultaneously solving the cryptogram they both kind of should get credit but um but they don't know about each other uh

and as you would expect the the words are written backwards concatenated together uh and there's a lot of typos in that original um tyler cryptogram so it's kind of exactly what we you would have expected right and had anyone been able to sort of put all those historical pieces together might have been able to solve it faster now so in 1990 by 1994 basically two people have solved it and everyone knows the solution to the first one but um the solution to the second one still hasn't uh come out and in 1998 a williams college professor offers a prize of 2 500 for the solution to the second one there's also some uh some thought that maybe poe himself

has written both of these and that therefore that the translations may be new po work um that turns out to not be the case but um uh so there's another site called the bachler cryptography website anyone know about that one so i kind of got my start doing cryptography in about 19 about 1998 and i remember going to the bachler site frequently um and getting a lot of information about cryptography it was fairly famous and sort of well trafficked back back then obviously not so much anymore but buckler systems is still in business but um so so there's now a sort of a bounty on this decryption but it isn't until uh 2001 that a

toronto software engineer named gil borza is able to solve that second cryptogram so now they they both are solved but again they're sort of fairly famous for being in that unsolved cryptogram category for so long um and uh so anyway so it's uh if you were learning crypto back then that's something that's the kind of thing that you would have seen these two cryptograms out there right so anyway um so poe also writes a short story called the gold bug um and the short story this is probably his most famous cryptogram uh in that short story um a message is found and it's that message um and decrypted by the the main character of the story

and the message leads the characters on a treasure hunt right a lot of people think that treasure island may be based in in part on the gold bug right or or at least the gold bug was the inspiration for treasure stevenson's treasure island um but again if you look at this right this is very similar to the real world examples that you were seeing in alexander's and graham's magazine that were submitted by the the readers right so um so again very another very famous cryptogram uh the gold bug i know if you remember from the earlier slide uh sort of the um one of the things that spurred the interest of uh william friedman who goes on to be the head

cryptographer of nsa um you know he he was into the gold bug and he remembers reading that as a child um as well so uh inspired a lot of other people uh poe was not the only one to write uh fiction that was sort of based on a cryptography theme uh jules verne uh wrote three books that had crypto in it um 800 leagues on the amazon uh what was the other one's uh journey to the center of the earth had crypto in it and a book called matthias sandorf

sir arthur conan doyle who wrote the sherlock holmes stories uh wrote a book called the adventure of the dancing men which is the sherlock holmes book which also is based on these sort of um dancing men crypto messages they need to get decrypted and so that's the link to the alanka website uh there still are a large number of sort of these very old historic unsolved cryptograms you can go to that website and and check out some of them and uh i guess no discussion of poe is complete without sort of the discussion of sort of how he died on october 3rd 1849 poe was found delirious walking the streets of baltimore he died four days later at washington

college never becoming coherent enough to explain how he was how he became came to be in that state so no one knows exactly what happened to him there are theories that range the theories include suicide murder cholera hypoglycemia rabies syphilis influenza and cooping does anyone know what cooping is yes in the back no [Laughter]

no that's not it anyone else want to take another try yeah say again no cooping c-o-o-p-i-n-g it it's being kept in a confined space so some i guess for some reason they think that that his symptoms are similar to that of somebody who's been sort of kept in this very confined space for a long period of time um though you know like why would that have happened you know it doesn't make a lot of sense but uh anyway that's his uh that's his current grave um again that's where he was moved to it's again about a half a mile from here um he's buried there with his wife as well um so from about 1930

to about 1998 someone known as the po toaster would go to his original grave site which has that marker on it and drink a toast of cognac in his honor leave three roses in a particular very specific pattern and then leave was never identified no one knows who it was and or why this person did that after 1998 it's reasonably clear that it was somebody else who did it up through 2009 the general understanding is that it was a son so we think that this man had a son and the son took over the responsibilities probably on his father's death but you know that's not proven we don't know who it was in 2000 i'm sorry life magazine took

that photo on the left in 1990 in 2010 there was no visit in 2006 a number of people tried to detain the person who would be the son to figure out who it was but he escaped and no one knows and as saying in 2010 he didn't come back and in 2011 four people showed up none of them left the roses in the correct pattern and the pattern was known because there's a museum there and the the person who ran the museum was sort of on hand for this and he would always be the first person out so he sort of knows the brand of of cognac that that is the right brand of cognac because they kept

the bottles in the museum and and he knows the pattern of the roses but he doesn't say so it's sort of like that thing that the police leave out of the police report so that they can tell you know if somebody confesses that how would they know that they have the right person so the pattern of the roses is the is sort of a detail that's missing so the four foe toasters in uh 2011 didn't didn't do things right and everyone knows of course that was not only that they were a fake right because obviously three of them were fakes but they also know that the fourth one was also a fake right and um and in 2015 the maryland

historical society decided that that it would be a good idea that they sort of keep the tradition going right so without trying to pretend that they were the real toaster they've sort of got somebody who's now doing this going forward you know to try to keep the tradition uh alive uh so anyway so that's edgar allan poe and i i think that you know as you can see he'd probably be someone who would be kind of welcome and um here in our community right uh some of the the way he approached things and the things that he did you know kind of the way thing we do things as well you know with sort of the bring it on

challenges and you know challenge accepted and uh you know never roll your own crypto uh sort of very it would definitely be the kind of thing that you know that we would all that we would all do and i think that he would be he would be welcomed by us and he would probably be interested in uh hanging out within the hacker community so uh so that's a little information about you know baltimore and poe and literature and crypto and any questions sean yeah so the the original marker that little marker they didn't think was was sort of good enough for someone befitting his his fame right so they thought that a more the much larger site was sort of more

appropriate

right so all we have is that is the discussion from that secret writing part 1 where he does go through and sort of in a rigorous way say these are the ways that people might permute language in a sort of a substitution cipher type of way and these are why that would not work so it's mostly we don't really have a discussion from him of what would work it's more a whole bunch of things that would not work and it's tyler's response to him i think in in secret writing 4 that to me is the most interesting right is tyler is kind of getting there right he's saying hey look the ability to keep secrets and the

ability to create real cryptography is very important right and obviously today critical right and we all we all see that and it's just sort of obvious right but but tyler is one of the first people to kind of get there and say you know not only is this very important but we might be able to come up with a real secure cryptogram right and tyler is kind of trying to work through in his head what would this look like in secure world and um and he gets pretty close right um you know as if you tyler goes through a whole discussion about look if if i have the same letter in the crypt text that could potentially

decrypt two different letters in the plain text then we end up with a plain text that could be a or it could be b and that's that's not good right because that means that there could be two different translations right but the opposite way as long as there's only one plain text but it could map to multiple cipher texts that's okay as long as you have a way of knowing which cipher text to you're going to right um and so he's he's verging if you if you end up with a key that is as long as the message you're you basically have a one-time pad and tyler doesn't use that word and he doesn't know that that's where he's

going right but if you kind of read it read between the lines there in 1840 he's generally going in that direction which i think is sort of very interesting so so it's this whole dialogue of what's happening you know it's not so much that you know that poe's got her tyler's got her or whatever but these guys are kind of going through those steps in a much more rigorous way than anyone else in 1840 and you know prior to this there's really nothing about how to do this right right and so these guys are basically this is one of the first dialogues where you really have that discussion about you know it's like hey we might

we might need a real crypto scheme that might be secure and they're trying they're trying to get there any other questions sure uh nope never heard from again it's like the tiger [Laughter] like the dog on the ship you know it was like nope it's just a open-ended open-ended thing it's uh nothing else happens anyone else sure

i did not know that that's great right i just that's great i was not aware of that one sure i have not now right yeah he he was uh while he spent most of his time in baltimore he um he wasn't born here and he also spent time i think he had family in virginia and he would go to philly as well and so he was he was in multiple cities but i'd say baltimore is out sort of his home for the longest period of time anyone else right right

so i don't think there's so an enigma right is from in that sense is really like a riddle right it's it's this unknown thing so i think that that they were both going for that same definition but i don't think that the machine is directly tied to that poem um so much he also had another poem called so that one was called an enigma poe also wrote another poem called enigma so it's like you can't confuse the two of them but yeah i think it's just just a word for you know sort of a riddle or a mystery right you don't think what oh right right right anything else all right well thanks for coming