Presented at
DEF CON 32 (2024),
Aug. 10, 2024, 4 p.m.
(45 minutes).
Between 1850 and 1855, the London-based newspaper The Times published over 50 encrypted advertisements apparently intended for the same recipient. As we know today, the ads in that series were meant for the sea captain Richard Collinson, who at the time was on a mission in the Canadian Arctic trying to solve a captivating mystery: What happened to the lost John Franklin expedition? While Collinson never reached his goal, he established a secure worldwide communication system, which was unique for its time.
Before his departure, Collinson's family was taught how to encrypt brief reports about what was going on at home and to publish these messages as mysterious ads in “The Times” once a month. The cipher used was a modified version of a system based on a signal-book of the Royal Navy. As the circulation of The Times stretched far beyond the UK, Collinson would have the chance to get his hands on a copy even at the remotest of ports.
Over a century later, the Collinson ads were finally broken in the 1990s. Over the last two years, the lecturers of this talk continued this work, with a goal of decrypting all of the ads and placing them in their appropriate geographic and cultural context.
- Article in “Mental Floss” (this was written based on one of our earlier talks)
- Ellen Gutoskey: How Victorian Explorers and Pining Lovers Used Coded Newspaper Ads to Communicate. Aug 10, 2022
- [link](https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/victorian-coded-messages-franklin-expedition)
- 1992 Research paper in Cryptologia:
- John Rabson: All are Well at Boldon a mid-Victorian Code System. Cryptologia 16(2): 127-135 (1992)
- Book about encrypted newspaper advertisements:
- Jean Palmer: The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers. New Generation Publishing, London 2006
- Naval codebooks:
- 10th edition (1847): [link](https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Code_of_Signals_in_the_Merchant_Servic/J1APe67ngc8C)
- 11th edition (1851): [link](https://books.google.de/books/about/The_universal_code_of_signals_for_the_me.html?id=jGEBAAAAQAAJ)
- 12th edition (1854): [link](https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_universal_code_of_signals_for_the_me/jGEBAAAAQAAJ)
- Collinson’s logbooks (by his brother):
- Thomas Bernard Collinson: Cypher Notices in the ‘Times’. In: Journal of H.M.S. Enterprise, on the Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin's Ships by Behring Strait. 1850-55. Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington. London: 1889 [link](https://archive.org/details/cu31924083524409/page/2/mode/2up)
- Article from the 1940s:
- Richard J. Cyriax: The Collinson Cryptograms in "The Times". Notes and Queries 26 July, 1947: 322-323
Presenters:
-
Elonka Dunin
- Crypto Expert
Elonka Dunin is a crypto expert and co-leader of a group that is working to crack the final cipher on the Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters. She maintains a website of the World’s most famous unsolved codes, and bestselling author Dan Brown named his character “Nola Kaye”, a scrambled form of “Elonka”, in his novel The Lost Symbol, after her.
Elonka was a member of the Board of Directors for the National Cryptologic Museum Foundation, and General Manager and Executive Producer at Simutronics, making award-winning online and mobile games.
In 2006, Elonka published The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms, and with Klaus she co-wrote the book Codebreaking: A Practical Guide, with editions in 2020 and 2023.
-
Klaus Schmeh
- Crypto Expert at Eviden
Klaus Schmeh has written 15 books (mostly in German) about cryptography, as well as over 250 articles, 25 scientific papers, and 1500 blog posts. Klaus’s main fields of interest are codebreaking and the history of encryption.
Klaus is a popular speaker, known for his entertaining presentation style involving self-drawn cartoons, self-composed songs, and Lego models. He has lectured at hundreds of conferences, including the NSA Crypto History Symposium, DEF CON, and the RSA Conference.
In his day job, Klaus works as a crypto expert for the global IT security company Eviden.
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