Researchers decipher the encrypted letters of Mary Queen of Scots

A programmer, a musician and a physicist enter the archives of the National Library. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but the climax is very serious: Researchers from various profiles managed to find and decipher 57 letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots, during her imprisonment by the Queen’s cousin, Elizabeth I, writes Gizmodo.

The letters are dated 1578-1584, shortly before Mary was beheaded on February 8, 1587. He was found guilty of supporting a conspiracy against his cousin, Elizabeth I. The decrypted letters contained about 50,000 words and 50 previously unknown inscriptions that Maria used when communicating with her partners using a cipher. The team’s research was published in the journal Cryptologia.

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“We used a technique called climbing the mountain from the problem optimization realm to crack the password. We start with a random key, decrypt the ciphertext with that key, make minor changes to the key, and decrypt it again,” said George Lasry. , Computer Science and DECRYPT contributor: “If the new key is better decrypted, we save the change. Otherwise, we discard the change.”

Lasry and his colleagues — Norbert Biermann, professor of music at the Berlin University of the Arts, and Satoshi Tomokio, a physicist and patent expert — searched the online archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France for encrypted letters. The library itself is filled with valuable written documents of historical significance, from Marie Curie’s radioactive notebook to Korean engravings, some of the earliest documents ever printed on wood.

The trio stumbled upon several uncategorized, encrypted documents that the library lists as works related to Italy from the early 16th century. However, after examining the documents, the researchers found that they were in France and had nothing to do with Italy.

Lasry said the moment of insight for the team was the discovery of the name Walsingham in the letters. Francis Walsingham was Elizabeth I’s chief secretary, and her team wrote enough of her letters during Mary’s detention to establish a case for the Catholic queen’s execution.

In their article, the team wrote that Walsingham was “often mentioned in letters.” Marie warns Castelnau of his plans in France and Scotland, describing him in negative terms as a cunning man who falsely offers his friendship while concealing his true intentions.

Maria also reacts to the kidnapping of her young son, James.

According to the team, a series of letters from the second half of 1582 shed light on Mary’s violent reaction to the news that her son James had been abducted by a Scottish mob and desperately sought help from France. When the French king finally sends an emissary to Scotland, Mary expresses her disappointment with the results and feels that France has abandoned her and her son.

“This is only the first phase of the project. We look forward to seeing what information historians can derive from these letters,” Lasri said.

The job takes a lot of time. According to the researchers, the 57 letters contained about 150,000 individual characters that needed to be processed; It took longer to decrypt documents than to decrypt them.

A closer examination of the letters can provide more details about what the queen knew about the time she was imprisoned and the actions of accomplices they perpetrated on her behalf.

Previously Focus wrote about the oldest message in a bottle. Researchers found it in Scotland.

We also said that scientists have finally managed to decipher the secret letter of Charles V, the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.