How We Broke the Ciphers of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II 

Hiho, The DECRYPT database is not a tool for decryption :-) its a database where we collect historical ciphers. For cryptanalysis, you may use any of the CrypTools, e.g. CrypTool 2 or JCrypTool. Also, I don't know why you need a programming language since the tools have analyzers for various classical ciphers? Also, which ciphers you want to cryptanalyze? I made a video about how to attack ciphers you may want to watch: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-td-mS7jkOy8.html Greetings, Nils

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoy the videos of my channel. Actually, emperor Maximilian II came from the Habsburg dynasty, so the ciphers presented in this video are already "Habsburg ciphers" :-) If you are further interested in Habsburg cryptography, I recommend you also take a look at the very good overview on Satoshi Tomokiyo's website. Here, you will find the page dedicated to Habsburg ciphers: cryptiana.web.fc2.com/code/habsburg.htm Best regards, Nils

@@CryptographyForEverybody thanks that s exactly what i searched WBG Reinhold

@CryptographyForEverybody

Hey there, CrypTool can handle more complex homophonic ciphers, but it does require more text and often involves more manual work. One approach is to restart the homophonic substitution analyzer and gradually lock parts of the text as you identify partial words. This way, you can incrementally work towards a solution, with CrypTool assisting you along the way. I’ve successfully solved more complex ciphers, including also those with nulls. The analyzer in CrypTool has also a feature to help identify nulls since these are often used with very low frequency and can sometimes be spotted automatically. However, you face much bigger challenges if your ciphertext consists of continuous digits without clear separation instead of "fancy" symbols. In such cases, the difficulty lies in finding the correct segmentation between the digits. For this, you might need to create your own tokenizer or custom script, as CrypTool’s standard tools are not sufficient for this task. Finally, we have a new analyzer which right now only supports manual analysis (in CTO: www.cryptool.org/en/cto/homophonic-substitution-analyzer/) which is more powerful for working manually on complex ciphers. We also plan to implement automatic analysis in the future. Good luck with your decryption efforts! PS: What kind of cipher are you working on? a historical? Greetings, Nils

@@CryptographyForEverybody Thanks so much for this guidance, Nils! Yeah, it's a historical cipher. Could I bother you with a follow-up question? The cipher consists of digits WITH clear separators, so I'm able to isolate each ciphertext symbol (ie. number) easily and I'm feeding it into Cryptool accordingly. The analyzer is isolating each number correctly, no problem. However, it's not clear from the ciphertext where the boundaries between words are AND I know that there is no ciphertext symbol signifying a space. As a result, in the Homophonic Substitution Analyzer settings, I have de-selected "Use spaces" (since there is no symbol for spaces between words) and selected "Use nulls" (which I already know are present). Does Cryptool struggle when there is no symbol or indicator for spaces separating words? This ciphertext alphabet just doesn't have that, and there aren't physical spaces on the manuscript page indicating boundaries between words either. You'd be my hero if you could offer some guidance on this!

@cryptographyforeverybody