Theme: Edgar Allan Poe
Every year, RSA® Conference is built around a different theme which highlights a significant historical example of information security. In 2009, we celebrate the influence of Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe was fascinated by cryptography, which he often treated in his journalism and fiction. He concealed anagrams and hidden messages in his own poems. His famous story – “The Gold Bug” – centers on the solution of a cipher, which turns out to be a map to hidden private treasure.
In 1839 Poe conducted his own cryptographic challenge. Writing in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, Poe challenged his readers to submit their cryptographs to him, asserting that he would solve them all. A year later Poe wrote an article for Graham’s Magazine titled “A Few Words on Secret Writing”. In it, he offered to give a free subscription to the magazine to anyone who would send him a cipher he could not crack.
Poe ended the contest six months later, claiming to have solved all of the 100 ciphers sent to him. He concluded by publishing two ciphers ostensibly sent in by Mr. W. B. Tyler, praising their author as a “gentleman whose abilities we highly respect” and challenging readers to solve them.
There the ciphers remained until 1985 when Professor Louis Renza of Dartmouth College suggested that Tyler was actually a double for Poe himself. Renza’s theory was later elaborated by Shawn Rosenheim in his book The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Allan Poe to the Internet. In it, Rosenheim points to the likelihood that the ciphers were placed in the magazine by Poe himself as a final challenge to his readers.
Join us in London to remember and celebrate Edgar Allan Poe’s life, work — and his powerful and enduring legacy to furthering the field of cryptography.