![]() ![]() During the American Civil War, the system was used by Union prisoners in Confederate prisons. George Washington's army had documentation about the system, with a much more randomized form of the alphabet. One of the earliest stones in Trinity Church Cemetery in New York City, which opened in 1697, contains a cipher of this type which deciphers to "Remember death" (cf. Tombstones of Freemasons can also be found which use the system as part of the engravings. They began using it in the early 18th century to keep their records of history and rites private, and for correspondence between lodge leaders. Hysin claims it was invented by Freemasons. Variations of this cipher were used by both the Rosicrucian brotherhood and the Freemasons, though the latter used the pigpen cipher so often that the system is frequently called the Freemason's cipher. This system, called "The Kabbalah of the Nine Chambers" by later authors, used the Hebrew alphabet rather than the Latin alphabet, and was used for religious symbolism rather than for any apparent cryptological purpose. In 1531 Cornelius Agrippa described an early form of the Rosicrucian cipher, which he attributes to an existing Jewish Kabbalistic tradition. Parrangan & Parrangan write that it was used by an individual, who may have been a Mason, “in the 16th century to save his personal notes.” Thompson writes that, “there is evidence that suggests that the Knights Templar utilized a pig-pen cipher” during the Christian Crusades. The cipher is believed to be an ancient cipher and is said to have originated with the Hebrew rabbis. Indeed, knowledge of Pigpen is so ubiquitous that an interceptor might not need to actually break this cipher at all, but merely decipher it, in the same way that the intended recipient would.ĭue to Pigpen's simplicity, it is very often included in children's books on ciphers and secret writing. ![]() Worse, because it is both very well-known and instantly recognizable, it is arguably among the worst ciphers one can possibly choose from a security standpoint. Its use of symbols instead of letters in no way impedes cryptanalysis, and this cipher is not otherwise different from any other simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher. The example key shows one way the letters can be assigned to the grid.Īlthough Pigpen might be regarded as a fun cipher to use, it offers almost no cryptographic security at all. The pigpen cipher (alternatively referred to as the masonic cipher, Freemason's cipher, Napoleon cipher, and tic-tac-toe cipher) is a geometric simple substitution cipher, which exchanges letters for symbols which are fragments of a grid. The pigpen cipher uses graphical symbols assigned according to a key similar to the above diagram. ![]()
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