Substitution Cipher Based on The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript is a hand written book from the 15th century. It is written in an unknown language using unknown characters. People have been trying to decipher it since forever, but as yet there has been no success. There are a couple of theories on what it is, one of which is that it is just gibberish written by a madman. Another theory is that it is an encryption of a text in another language like Latin. Today I found this post on Schneier on Security:

Here’s a fun paper: “The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext“:

Abstract: In this article, I investigate the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript (MS 408, Yale University Beinecke Library) is compatible with being a ciphertext by attempting to develop a historically plausible cipher that can replicate the manuscript’s unusual properties. The resulting cipher­a verbose homophonic substitution cipher I call the Naibbe cipher­ can be done entirely by hand with 15th-century materials, and when it encrypts a wide range of Latin and Italian plaintexts, the resulting ciphertexts remain fully decipherable and also reliably reproduce many key statistical properties of the Voynich Manuscript at once. My results suggest that the so-called “ciphertext hypothesis” for the Voynich Manuscript remains viable, while also placing constraints on plausible substitution cipher structures.

The first problem anyone attempting to decipher this manuscript runs into is deciding just which symbols are letters, since the symbols tend to run into each other. And then there is the problem of assigning tokens. Only after that is done can you begin trying to decipher it using a computer.