European Historical Ciphers Colloquium (EuroHCC)
EuroHCC brings together computer scientists, mathematicians, linguists, historians, and all other who are interested in classical cryptography and cryptanalysis from all over the world.
The colloquium is organized by the research group Applied Information Security of the University of Kassel in Kassel, Germany and the Mathematical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences with cooperation of the Institute of Computer Science and Mathematics of the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia.
EuroHCC2017
The third EuroHCC 2017 will be in Castle Smolenice in Slovakia in 2017.
On the behalf of the program commitee we like to invite everyone interested in classical cryptography and cryptanalysis to join us in 2017 for the third edition of the EuroHCC. The colloquium will cover modern computerized cryptanalysis of classical ciphers and algorithms as well as their historical background.
The colloquium's subject will be the analysis of historical ciphers and cryptographic algorithms and machines with the help of modern computerized methods as well as the historical backgrounds. The reasons for analyzing and attacking classical ciphers are manifold: First, developing heuristic approaches for cryptanalysis helps cryptanalysts and researchers to get a better understanding of the classical cipher as well as a deeper insight into the used heuristics, i.e., hillclimbing, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, tabu search, etc. Second, it helps other researchers, like historians, to decipher encrypted historical messages. That in turn helps to get new knowledge of previously unknown historical events.
EuroHCC2016
The second EuroHCC 2016 took place at the University of Kassel in 2016.
The EuroHCC in 2016 was a great success and we had participants from all around Europe. About 25 vistiors found their way to the University of Kassel, although the colloquium's day was an official holiday in Germany and many other European countries.
Our first speaker, Mr. George Lasry from Israel gave a talk about his research on classical ciphers using hillclimbing-based attacks. The second speaker, Dr. Ingo Niebel from Germany gave a talk about the insights that we got by the decryption of ADFGVX encrypted messages of the Eastern Front of World War I. Our third speaker, Mr Klaus Schmeh from Germany gave a talk about encryption and crime. Our fourth speaker, Dr. Nicolas Curtois from the United Kingdom gave a talk about a survey of basic principles of cryptanalysis based on concepts of SAT/UNSAT immunity, fixed-point attacks, slide attacks, involution attacks, cycle structure attacks, permutation factoring, amplification, reflections etc.
Besides the four main talks, we had two additional short talks: George Lasry talked about the top ten open problems of historical cipher systems and Nils Kopal introduced the upcoming version 2.1 of the free crypto e-learning software CrypTool 2.
