Dorabella - the Elgar Cipher

[Skatha]

I posted this a while ago on another forum, but very little notice was taken of it - perhaps understandably as it's defied decryption for quite a long time.



Anyone seen this before? Any ideas? I keep looking at it and thinking it still looks like a straightforward substitution cipher, except that never yields any results.

[AncientBrit]

Well, I think I know what part of it says (as you may be aware :

Fictio a tuit ad loerat...

I'm still working on the rest though (albeit less feverishly than perhaps I ought to be

I might drop a sample of the proposed MRF coding system into another thread, just for the hell of it. But not right now - it's tax time

[AncientBrit]

Just a quick update.

I'm still looking at the "musical" rail fence aspect but in the meantime I wondered whether the "Latin piece" was only significant in that it pointed to the remainder (64 symbols/characters) as being an 8 x 8 Latin square.

The result of that thought is:

a l o a r a s m
h h m t d a l o
e s e n d t o r
e e r i g h i n
o n e n a s t n
p n t e u u o e
e w e y d e s p
h i n o c i r u

(depends on whether the font is monospaced or not as to how "sensible" it looks).

What's interesting is that if you read vertical lines it begins "Ah, EE..." and later "mere ten at nine" pops up in the middle.

Now bearing in mind that (i) some of the interpretation of the symbols has yet to be fully confirmed and (ii) the letter frequencies against which this interpretation was made have yet to be confirmed as representative, it still looks a little more interesting than it used to...

A further thought is that it might be necessary to 'walk" the square in a particular manner in order to extract the original message. That's another line of research too (just in case you thought there was nothing much left to explore).

Gary McKinnon (being threatened with extradition to the US for alledged hacking offences) claimed recently to be the only person to have cracked the DoraBella cipher. He apparently used the concept that Elgar used to create a Code Challenge for a recent Security exhibition, and published a solution:

www.infosec.co.uk/page.cfm/link=288

The problem is I don't think he really cracked the cipher at all - but so far we can't get close enough to him to find out. He has a form of Internet leprosy - no-one dares go near him for fear of being subject to guilt-by-association risks...

More to follow...

Best,

Peter

[AncientBrit]

A bit more on the possible solution: the "mere ten at nine" might actually be "omereten at nine".

Recent research has highlighted the fact that there was a Chorus Superintendent at Worcester call Somerton, and Elgar may have had an appointment with him - perhaps at nine (am or pm isn't clear yet), to which Dora may have been invited in the message (yes, it could be as bland as that).

Elgar may have distorted the name as he did with so many words. I have ordered a book that contains details of letters between Elgar and Ivor Atkins, wherein Somerton is mentioned, so we'll see what comes out of that.

The fact that it doesn't appear instantly to be "somereten" could be down to an incorrect misinterpretation of one of the symbols, or a slightly incorrect match of the two frequency distributions.

Or even a typo (scribo?) by Elgar as he transposed letters to symbols and probably steps in between.

More to come...

Peter

[AncientBrit]

I don't know whether anyone accesses this board - I seem to be the only one! - but anyway, Dora's getting some exposure courtesy of the BBC and Professor Kevin Jones, here:

www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/interact/puzzles/dorabellacode.shtml

They're a tad slow in posting comments (mine took days to appear) and the published (and edited, possibly) comments are in reverse chronological order, which may not be immediately apparent...

There's a prize offered this year (into June 2008) for anyone finding an agreed solution to the cipher. If UKP1500 whets your appetite, follow up the link to the Elgar Society:

www.elgar.org/5cipher.htm

Still working on it...

Peter

[AncientBrit]

Finally I found some time to put together a simple tool to help me with exploring the Dorabella Cipher. The current implementation is only partially complete but I thought I'd shove it out for anyone interested to have a go. It's currently written in Excel VBA3 (so you'll need Office/Excel 97 or later to use it), and I've put together some very preliminary documentation to show how it works.

You'll also need to install a special font in order to view the cipher symbols in the tool.

All of the files are available here:

www.story-lines.com/edwardElgar/DoraBellaTool

The default configuration uses English (other languages are planned) and a version of ETAOIN SHRDLU that gets you started at the same point that I started.

Enjoy. Any problems, email scattergun support at [e-mail].

Peter

[escher7]

Try this on for size: www.aerobushentertainment.com/crypto/index.php?topic=174.0

Pretty sure it's the solution.