satukubik

When I was in school in Indonesia, I used to be a scout. And as a scout, I learn some ciphers from the one that is simplest, such as shift cipher to a more complicated cipher like semaphore and morse (well, now you couldn’t say they are cipher anyway, since all people know how to decode it, it is now more like a skill).

Another simple cipher which I learn back then is called as ’sandi kotak’ in Indonesian. Do you recognize picture above? That is the result of the cipher. Yesterday, I see it in the tv serial Vanished, where I recognized the unique form of the symbols in the cipher. This make me anxious, why FBIs are hardly recognized this simple kind of cipher? So my little research is beginning. At first, I thought the name of the cipher will be very similar to the English translation of Indonesian name, so it should be something like ‘box cipher’, ’square cipher’ or something like that.

I was wrong… After some times I found that the English name for the cipher is Pigpen cipher, and guess what… It actually used by Freemason to communicate.

Well, if you never heard about pigpen cipher or ’sandi kotak’, here is the way it works. First, a pigpen cipher will based on this picture:

Based on that, we can encrypt every letter by getting the shape outside the letter, for example:

For the second letter, we add dot in the middle of the shape, just like this:

It’s very easy, isn’t it?

In the tv serial that I say before, the director has modify something so that the reference image is something like this:

It looks like this:

And the code in the tv serial is like this:

To encrypt, use the same method like I say before.

And I used to know second form of ’sandi kotak’ called ’sandi kotak 2′ (it can translated to 2nd Pigpen Cipher, maybe…). The reference image is like this:

For the third letter, give two dot in the middle of the shape.