Étienne Bazeries

Étienne Bazeries (born August 21, 1846 in Port-Vendres , France , † November 7, 1931 ) was a French officer who had come into contact with secret scripts when he had tried, like Charles Wheatstone and Playfair , to send encrypted messages in the daily newspapers decipher . Bazeries "cracked" them and brought them to the officers' mess. Then Bazeries claimed to be able to decipher the French military code. He succeeded and the War Department changed the encryption system, but before the new method was implemented, Bazeries had already broken it again.

Bazeries has now been assigned to the State Department's Cipher Office. During this time he also began to be interested in old secret messages. So he deciphered texts that had been written in the time of Louis XIV . Among these was a letter encoded with the "Big Cipher" , the plain text of which was determined by Bazeries as possible evidence that the man with the iron mask could be Vivien de Bulonde .

In 1891 Bazeries presented the "Bazeries cylinder" named after him to the French military authorities, a system for automatic encryption based on the former Jefferson cylinder and the later M-94 encryption cylinder of the United States Army Signal Corps .

literature

• David Kahn : The Man in the Iron Mask - Encore et Enfin . Cryptologia . Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 29.2005,1 (January), pp. 43-94. ISSN  0161-1194
• Stephen Pincock and Mark Frary: Secret Codes - The Most Famous Encryption Techniques and Their History . Bastei Lübbe, 2007. ISBN 3-431-03734-8 .