Produced by P.I. Media. encryption comes up a lot in our podcast.

Crooks use it to blackmail their victims with ransom wares, countries and organizations use it to defend the secrets and so on.

The constant battle between those who wish to encrypt data

and those who wish to break these ciphers has made modern encryption schemes extremely powerful.

Subsequently, the tools and methods to break them became equivalently sophisticated,

culminating in the current development of quantum computers

that should be able to crack even the most difficult encryption in no time at all.

In this episode of Malicious Life, we're going back in time to an era with no computers,

no code, and no algorithms, and the question we'll be asking is this.

Could it be that someone in the 15th century created a cipher

that even today's most brilliant code-rakers

and most sophisticated and advanced tools cannot break. You're going to be. Hi, I'm Marian Levy.

Hi, I'm Ryan Levy.

Welcome to Cyberism's malicious life. About 12 miles southeast of Rome on a lofty hill stands an old Italian palace called Vila

Mondragon. The palace was built in the 15th century and was originally used as the summer

residence of Pope Gregory the 13th, but later became a Jesuit college.

By the early 20th century, the 500-year-old villa was in dire need of repairs and renovation.

The Jesuit order was short on cash and so it was decided to sell some of the old books kept in the Order's library. Some books were sold to the Vatican and in 1912 the order invited Wilfred Voinich

an American Antiquities dealer of Polish origin to buy the rest and indeed

Voinich left the villa with some 30 ancient manuscripts.

Of these 30 manuscripts, one picked his curiosity in particular.

It was a 240 page long book whose style suggested it might have been

...