Conference article

Uruguayan Cryptography: Printed Book Covers

Juan José Cabezas
Facultad de Ingenierfa, Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo, Uruguay

Francisco Castro
Facultad de Ingenierfa, Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo, Uruguay

Joachim von zur Gathen
B-IT, Universität Bonn, Germany

Jorge Tiscornia
Presidencia Uruguay, Montevideo, Uruguay

Alfredo Viola
Facultad de Ingenierfa, Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo, Uruguay

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Published in: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Historical Cryptology, HistoCrypt 2019, June 23-26, 2019, Mons, Belgium

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 158:7, p. 59-68

NEALT Proceedings Series 37:7, p. 59-68

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Published: 2019-06-12

ISBN: 978-91-7685-087-9

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

During the military dictatorship in Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, three encrypted documents were sent between members of the urban guerrilla MLN Tupamaros. In this work we present the second of these documents, whose text was encrypted by an array of colored circles on the covers of a book.

We introduce some of the history and the processes of image recognition and decryption of this document.

Keywords

substitution cipher Uruguay Tupamaros decryption Eva

References

Juan José Cabezas, Joachim von zur Gathen, and Jorge Tiscornia. 2018. Uruguayan cryptographic carpet. Proceedings HistoCrypt 2018, 21-27, http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/contents.asp?issue=149.

Francisco Castro. 2019. Printed book cover cryptanalysis: A formal approach. Master’s thesis, Facultad de Ingeniera, Universidad de la Repblica. In progress.

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Helena Ramalhinho Lourenço, Olivier C. Martin and Thomas Stützle, 2003. Iterated Local Search. In: Handbook of Metaheuristics, pages 320-353. Springer US, Boston, MA.

Jorge Tiscornia and Juan José Cabezas. 2015. El código secreto del tapiz del MLN hecho en el Penal de Libertad. Reportes Técnicos 15-10.

US Army. 1990. Basic Cryptanalysis. Chapter 5: Monoalphabetic Multilateral Substitution Ciphers. Headquarters Department of the Army. Washington DC.

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