Man has wanted to be able to send and receive secret messages since the beginning of human habitation on Earth. Well maybe not that early but I think you get my point. Greeks would cover a stone tablet in wax, write after they wrote a message on it, then write on the wax which was the custom of the day. When they went to read it they just dipped the tablet in hot water and the wax melted off, revealing the message. The first Chinese emperor left a terra cotta army of over 10,000 soldier statues. We now know that it may contain a secret message. Archaeologists noted that the shape of the faces correspond with ten characters in the Chinese alphabet. Leonardo da Vinci kept all his notes in code. Actually the code was handwriting that was written backwards so that it could only be read by holding a mirror in front of it. During the American Civil War, the Visionaire code was used. These codes were used to send orders secretly.

Not all codes are designed to keep messages secret. The Morse Code and International Code were created to facilitate the communications of messages from one place to another. The fact that not everyone could understand these codes was just a byproduct of their use.

One code that always seems to get used during wartime is the old book code. It is a simple code that uses the page, paragraph and sentence of words to form a message and if you don't have the same book, you might never break the code. Here is how it works. Two or more people get the same book. To send a message you find a word. If the word is on page 123 in paragraph 3 and is the 10 word in the sentence you would send 123-3-10 for that word and so on until you have formed your message. It is a simple code that has lasted a long time.

In World War II the Germans invented the Enigma Machine. Germans used the Enigma, an electromechanical cipher machine, to develop nearly unbreakable codes for sending messages. The Enigma's settings offered 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible solutions, yet the Allies were eventually able to crack its code. Used in assisting them to crack was the Bombe Machine an early computer. Little did they know that computers would make secret codes creation plentiful.

Enigma Machine
Picture and Text Source: CIA

Today secret codes are everywhere. They are buried in computer photographs and pictures, hidden in computer generated music, and are even in the open but require such long prime numbers that the average person with a computer would have to spend years trying to break the code.

Did you know that some people believe that Al-Qaida terrorists are hiding their coded messages in plain sight on Ebay? These codes buried in the data of a photograph can not be seen when viewed. Can you imagine having to read the data in every photo on the internet to make sure it doesn't contain coded data messages? I think this would be an impossible task. Steganography is the process of hiding data in a picture or photo. Mohamed Atta who killed thousands of Americans was downloading pictures from the internet before the 9/11 attacks. Did these pictures contain hidden messages and instructions, it sure looks like they did? The funny part of all this if that the ancient Greeks and Romans also would hide codes in pictures that were not noticeable to the untrained eye. So this is nothing new, except that with the advent of the computer you would actually have to read the picture data to find the code. Even finding the code may not be enough to decode it.

Picture Source: Cropped from a NASA Photograph

While not the usual type of Steganography the photograph that is pictured above was saved with IrfanView and is in jpeg format. If you click on properties you will get one screen. If you are running Windows XP as I am and have IrfanView and save the photo then click on properties on the photos icon you should get 3 screens on the properties app. If you go to the summary you should be able to read the message, 'This is a test". This is a very simple way of exchanging messages and out of the millions of photographs on the net, you would have to download every one to test them and you would need the program that saved the photo, installed on your machine to have the best chance to read the message. Now we do realize that this message can be put into a code to make it harder to read. This method doesn't even use the picture data and anyone can do it.

How hard are these codes to break? For you and me it would be impossible to break most of them, and the prime numbers codes just can't be done by one person, but leave it to human ingenuity to break a code. When everyone was feeling so secure about those long prime numbers codes being fool proof they found out that they were only proof for fools. It seems a group of code breakers joined forces (legally to test the code) and used hundreds of computers working in unison to crack the prime numbers. It was sort of the way Seti works. Seti is the Search for Extramarital Intelligence and they use the spare time on millions of computers to decipher signals. In effect the code breakers had created a super computer. This was something that the creators of the codes didn't foresee.

This was not the first time that creators of security codes got fooled. About ten years ago the creators of the code that protected our nuclear sites challenged a famous code breaker to break their code. All he had was an Apple computer. He locked himself in a hotel room for three days and at the end of that time he had broken in. I guess the moral of the story is that all codes can be broken eventually. The Japanese found that out too late in World War II.

Codes will come and codes will ago and a thousand years from now, if man survives, there will be more secret codes. But for every code there is a group of people just itching to break it.