I had always just believed it was because they were isolated, but I’d been thinking about it lately and that just doesn’t hold up. Can someone familiar with code breaking and encryption help me understand why they were nearly impossible to understand, while almost every other cipher was eventually cracked? Thank you!
In: Mathematics
In general terms, in order to decode something, you have to have some idea of what you are looking for. You use the rules of the language you expect to find upon decoding to look for patterns. For example a mistake that the Germans made in WWII was the frequent use of “Heil Hitler” .
You know the phrase is there and you know the number of letters. You know that there are two ‘E’s and you know where in the sequence of the phrase they will fall. So, if you find the right number of characters with the same character in the right place in the sequence:
You now know the designator for ‘E’ and by deduction H, I, L T, and R.
That’s a fair start, since you know you are looking for German words. By the way, the Germans also used the same routine opening especially in weather reports, so you got almost all of the letters.
However in a Navajo message you intercept even if the same phrase is repeated, you don’t know the the language you’re looking at, so you are looking for patterns in English… that don’t mean a thing in Navaho. Additionally, you are looking for military words like tank or airplane but they aren’t there.
The last thing is that Navaho was used for verbal transmissions. It’s much harder to do any analytics because you don’t have any easy way to determine individual characters or even breaks between words when it’s a conversation between two fluent speakers using a vernacular. An example in English would be “HiHowYaDoin”. “Copasetic!”
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