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Welcome to the Zodiac Ciphers wiki

This wiki is an attempt to gather all useful factual and verifiable information pertaining to the ciphers associated with the "Zodiac Killer". It is also a place to post results of experimental analysis of the ciphers.

There is so much information on these ciphers, but it is very hard to find in one place. This wiki tries to correct this problem by curating factual tidbits, experimental results, and analysis in a single location.

Site contents:

• Solved 408-character cipher
• Unsolved 340-character cipher
• Unsolved 13-character "My name is" cipher
• Webtoy's transcription scheme - ASCII representations of the ciphertext on this wiki use the Webtoy's ASCII transcriptions of the cipher.
• Software Tools
• Word counts from the Zodiac Killer's correspondences
• Research papers - Academic papers related to Zodiac ciphers in particular, and cryptography in general
• Cipher comparisons - Tabulation of measurements performed on an assortment of ciphers. Includes various test ciphers, and famous unsolved ciphers.

Discredited or inconclusive solution attempts

• Corey Starliper (340 cipher): An arbitrary decryption system that permits the insertion of a predetermined message.
  • Original news article
  • Analysis showing that Corey's solution is invalid
• AK Wilks / Zander Kite (32, 408, and 340 ciphers): These decryption systems permit many arbitrary solutions due to vast spaces of possible selections.
  • Original article
  • Analysis and discussion
• Robert Graysmith (340 cipher): Selective use of anagramming and other techniques, resulting in an incoherent message typical of anagram-based solutions.
  • Analysis and discussion
• John Cecil: Relaxes the "one plaintext letter per symbol" constraint, resulting in easily fitting a pre-conceived plaintext.
  • Post
• Hal Kravcik
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• Chris Farmer / OPORD
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• rand
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• Robert P. Ackerman
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• back2good
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• AuthUser
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• Pax
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• dronjom
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• Rembrandt
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• Hal 9000
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• Miscellaneous
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Discussions regarding these and other solution attempts

See Also

• The Zodiac Ciphers blog - A place for announcements and news related to the Zodiac ciphers.
• Transcriptions of letters associated with the Zodiac killer
• "Crypto 101" by glurk - An introduction to simple cryptography concepts.
• Top 10 uncracked codes (Curiously, the Zodiac codes are missing)
• Cipher Mysteries - Nick Pelling's fascinating site, filled with articles about mysterious unsolved historical and contemporary ciphers, including the Zodiac ciphers.

You can contact me here: Email me if you want an account here. Account creation is currently disabled due to abuse by spammers.