Over 50 undeciphered letters of Mary Stuart were found and deciphered by George Lasry, Norbert Biermann, and Satoshi Tomokiyo
It is probably one of, or even THE, greatest new cryptographic and historical sensation of recent years. My colleagues George Lasry, Norbert Biermann, and Satoshi Tomokiyo found over 50 previously undeciphered letters from Mary Queen of Scots, which she wrote to Michel de Castelnau Mauvissière, the French ambassador to England. All found in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris. The researchers successfully deciphered all of the letters and published their results in a stunning research article in the journal Cryptologia.
In this video, my friend George Lasry talks about how they found the letters, how they deciphered the letters, and what they found in the plaintexts of the deciphered letters. They broke the code with the help of cryptanalysis algorithms (which we also have implemented in CrypTool 2) as well as a lot of manual work, which took them more than a year.
Many thanks to George Lasry who provided the talk and gave permission to upload it to my YouTube channel (see video below).
Resources:
- The full Cryptologia paper is available open-access here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2022.2160677
- The DECRYPT project’s homepage you may visit here: https://de-crypt.org/
- Satoshi Tomokiyo’s Cryptiana website you can find here: http://cryptiana.web.fc2.com/code/crypto.htm
