Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/12/zodiac-killer-cipher-solved.html

The SF Chronicle is reporting (more details here), and the FBI is confirming, that a Melbourne mathematician and team has decrypted the 1969 message sent by the Zodiac Killer to the newspaper.

There’s no paper yet, but there are a bunch of details in the news articles.

Here’s an interview with one of the researchers:

Cryptologist David Oranchak, who has been trying to crack the notorious “340 cipher” (it contains 340 characters) for more than a decade, made a crucial breakthrough earlier this year when applied mathematician Sam Blake came up with about 650,000 different possible ways in which the code could be read. From there, using code-breaking software designed by Jarl Van Eycke, the team’s third member, they came up with a small number of valuable clues that helped them piece together a message in the cipher