Anomaly•Registry
AR-0189

The Chaocipher

Later explained
Date Invented 1918. Challenge published 1953. Algorithm disclosed 2 July 2010.
Location John F. Byrne’s archive, including his notes, 1920 blueprints and a wooden mock-up of the cipher-wheel mechanism, is held at the National Cryptologic Museum, Annapolis Junction, Maryland.
Coordinates 39.1148, -76.7748
Category Ciphers, Codes and Artifacts

Summary

John Francis Byrne devised a cipher in 1918 and spent two decades failing to interest the American military in it. In 1953 he published challenge messages in his autobiography, betting five thousand dollars, or three months of the book’s royalties, that nobody could read them. He called the system "absolutely unbreakable" and, in 1957, "forever indecipherable". Nobody claimed the money.

In May 2010 his family transferred his papers to the National Cryptologic Museum. That July the algorithm was published for the first time, ninety-two years after its invention. Every published exhibit was solved between August 2010 and 2016, and Byrne’s claim of absolute unbreakability fell with them.

how long the system stood unread in public 1918 to 2010: ninety two years 1918 devised by Byrne 1922 shown to Friedman 1953 the $5,000 challenge 2010 the algorithm published 2016 last exhibit solved PUBLISHED IN 2010, EVERY EXHIBIT SOLVED BY 2016. Byrne called it forever indecipherable and staked $5,000 on it. Solving one short message without its plaintext is still open. friedman saw the machine in 1922 and the war department did not take it up.
Figure Drawn by Anomaly Registry from the dated record. The bar spans invention to the public disclosure of the algorithm; the events beneath it are spaced evenly, not to scale. The private disclosure of 1990 is described in the record.

What is documented

The invention and the offers. Byrne devised the system in 1918 and tried to interest the Signal Corps and the Navy. The record carries dates: in August 1921 Colonel Parker Hitt wrote to him formally and returned the machine; in July 1922 he demonstrated his first machine at the War Department to Major Frank Moorman and to William Friedman; in 1937 he produced a working model and a pamphlet for the Navy Department; in 1938 he wrote again proposing a review of his blueprints. None of it was taken up.

The first machine. Built in a cigar box that "had contained fifty small Havana cigars". Rubin describes the device as two disks, each turning on its own spindle and meshing at the edge, so that turning one turns the other in the opposite direction.

The challenge. Published in 1953 in Silent Years: An Autobiography with Memoirs of James Joyce and Our Ireland. Chapter 21 carries plaintext with matching ciphertext, plus some enciphered lines whose plaintext is withheld. Byrne wrote that "my main reason for writing the book was to be on record in the matter of my Chaocipher".

The bet. Byrne staked five thousand dollars, or the total royalties of the first three months after publication. Nobody ever claimed it. Friedman, in a 1954 speech, referred to working on the problem "even with the $5,000 bait hung in front of my eyes".

The archive. On 10 May 2010, in Pepperell, Massachusetts, the Byrne papers were handed over on behalf of the inventor’s daughter-in-law and passed to the National Cryptologic Museum: two boxes of notes and correspondence, two copies of Silent Years, five blueprint drawings from 1920, and a large crude wooden mock-up of the cipher-wheel function. The original cigar-box machine was apparently destroyed and is not in the archive.

The disclosure. On 2 July 2010 Moshe Rubin published "Chaocipher Revealed: The Algorithm", describing itself as "the first full disclosure and description of Byrne’s Chaocipher algorithm". The Chaocipher Clearing House report of the same day put the interval: "Ninety-two years after its invention, and fifty-seven years after challenge messages were published."

How it works. Two twenty-six letter alphabets, one for ciphertext and one for plaintext. To encipher, find the plaintext letter in the right alphabet and take the letter directly above it in the left. Then both alphabets are permuted, by a fixed rule involving moving the just-used letter to a reference position, extracting a letter from a set offset, shifting the intervening block along and reinserting. Deciphering swaps the roles of the two alphabets. The essential feature is that the substitution table changes after every single letter, driven by the text itself.

The solutions, in sequence. Rubin deciphered Exhibit 1 in August 2010. Michael Cowan solved Exhibits 1 and 4 by cryptanalysis in December 2010. Esa Peuha solved Exhibits 2 and 3, listed in October 2013. Exhibit 5 was solved by Calof, Hill and Rubin, published in Cryptologia in 2014. George Lasry, with Rubin, Kopal and Wacker, solved Exhibit 6, all fifty messages, published in Cryptologia in 2016.

How Cowan did it. A backtracking search placing successive plaintext and ciphertext pairs into the wheels, followed by a genetic algorithm to infer Byrne’s setup keyword. He recovered the wheel settings at the 85th pair of Exhibit 1 and then read the withheld sections: 262 plaintext letters and a final seventeen. For Exhibit 4 he found the settings at position 178 and worked back; the opening twenty cipher letters turned out to be a separate simple code carrying the machine setup instructions.

What is still open. Cowan’s 2010 paper left ten letters of his Exhibit 1 solution unexplained. More substantively, the Chaocipher Clearing House lists solving a single ciphertext message with no matching plaintext as open in both forms of the system, and gives sixty to eighty messages as the requirement for an in-depth ciphertext-only attack on the classic form, or six hundred to eight hundred for the extended form.

The verdict on the inventor. Rubin’s appraisal concludes that Byrne "had no formal cryptanalytic training", which "clouded his judgment of his invention’s strength", while judging that "the Chaocipher crypto-system embodied a principle ahead of its time". Rubin relates that principle, a substitution table that shuffles as it is used, to dynamic substitution, which Terry Ritter formalised in 1990.

Leading explanations

It is a dynamic-substitution system using two mutually permuting alphabets (Rubin, 2010; established). The mechanism described above. It was verified by reproducing Byrne’s own published plaintext and ciphertext pairs, and then used independently by four other people to solve every published exhibit.

Byrne’s claim of absolute unbreakability (rejected, with a qualification). Refuted by the solutions. The qualification matters: the system is broken under known-plaintext conditions and in depth, not from a single short ciphertext, which the Chaocipher Clearing House still lists as open.

It anticipated a principle formalised seventy years later (Rubin, 2011). Rubin relates Byrne’s mutual-permutation design to dynamic substitution, which Terry Ritter formalised in 1990.

What the popular version gets wrong

"It stayed secret from 1918 until the 2010 museum donation." The method was disclosed privately to the editors of Cryptologia in 1990, and an article by Byrne’s son and two of the editors, "Chaocipher Enters the Computer Age when its Method is Disclosed to Cryptologia Editors", appeared in the journal that July. What 2010 produced was the first full public description. The ninety-two year figure measures invention to public disclosure, not invention to any disclosure at all.

"Byrne’s machine is in the National Cryptologic Museum." It is not. The museum’s own acquisition record states the original cigar-box machine was apparently destroyed. What the archive holds is papers, two copies of the book, five blueprints from 1920 and a crude wooden mock-up. The disks sometimes pictured belong to that mock-up.

"Moshe Rubin cracked the Chaocipher." He disclosed and described the algorithm, having been given access to the Byrne material, and deciphered one exhibit. The exhibits were solved by several people over six years, and the solution by cryptanalysis from the plaintext and ciphertext pairs was Cowan’s.

"Chaocipher remains an unsolved cipher challenge." An out-of-date sentence that still sits on the Chaocipher Clearing House’s own introductory page and evidently predates July 2010. The same site’s current research page records all six exhibits solved.

Current status

Later explained. The algorithm is public and established, verified against Byrne’s own published pairs and used to solve all six exhibits between August 2010 and 2016. The claim of absolute unbreakability is refuted. The remaining gaps are narrow and are listed by the Chaocipher Clearing House itself: key recovery from ciphertext with matching plaintext in the extended form "has not yet been tackled", and solving a single ciphertext message is open in both forms. Cowan’s 2010 paper also left ten letters of one solution unexplained. A published and reproduced solution of a single short Chaocipher message with no matching plaintext would move the system from broken under favourable conditions to broken outright.

Sources

  • Rubin, M. (2010). "Chaocipher Revealed: The Algorithm", dated 2 July 2010. Read as the PDF. Source of the algorithm description, the description of the device and the first-full-disclosure claim.
  • Rubin, M. (2011). "John F. Byrne’s Chaocipher Revealed: An Historical and Technical Appraisal." Cryptologia, 35(4), pp. 328 to 379. Read as the submitted version; the published version could not be opened. Source of the appraisal of Byrne quoted above.
  • Cowan, M. J. (2010). "Chaocipher: Solving Exhibits 1 and 4", December 2010. Read in full. Source of the method, the recovery positions, the recovered letter counts and the ten unexplained letters.
  • Lasry, G., Rubin, M., Kopal, N. and Wacker, A. (2016). "Cryptanalysis of Chaocipher and solution of Exhibit 6." Cryptologia, 40(6), pp. 487 to 514. Bibliographic record read; the full text could not be opened.
  • National Cryptologic Museum Foundation. Chaocipher acquisition record. Source of the 10 May 2010 transfer, the contents of the archive and the statement that the original machine was destroyed.
  • The Chaocipher Clearing House (chaocipher.com): progress reports, the current state of research page, and the compilation of Byrne’s own assertions. Source of the ninety-two and fifty-seven year figures, the approaches to the War and Navy Departments with their dates, the five thousand dollar bet and the remaining open problems. One page of that site still carries a pre-2010 sentence calling the cipher unsolved, which is addressed in the corrections above.
  • Byrne, J. F. (1953). Silent Years. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young. Could not be opened; cited through the sources above.
  • Byrne, J., Deavours, C. and Kruh, L. (1990). "Chaocipher Enters the Computer Age when its Method is Disclosed to Cryptologia Editors." Cryptologia, 14(3), pp. 193 to 198. Could not be opened; cited as the record of the 1990 private disclosure.

Last reviewed: November 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.

Related records
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AR-0022 Kryptos An encrypted sculpture at CIA headquarters. Three sections solved; the fourth is still open. 1990 Partially explained
AR-0020 The Voynich Manuscript An illustrated codex written in an unknown script. Still undeciphered after a century of attempts. c. 1404 to 1438 Unsolved

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