Native American Encryption?!
Arthur Chandler
arthurc at crl.com
Tue Oct 12 17:29:55 PDT 1993
I remember hearing many years ago that one of the branches of the armed
aervices during WWII used a native American -- Cherokee? Apache? --
language to communicate. The Japanese (the story goes) went nuts trying to
crack the code -- unsuccessfully.
Two questions:
1) Can anyone give me a reference for this story (assuming it's true)?
2) If one used a natural language for encryption, and the would-be code
crackers did not know it was natural language (say, Hittite), could they crack
it? I seem to remember that hieroglyphs were undecipherable until the
Rosetta Stone was discovered. But maybe current techniques would do a
better job....?
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