Null Ciphers: The Message in the Noise

Imagine reading a seemingly dull letter sent from the United States to Europe during the height of World War I. The text is dense, full of business jargon, and utterly forgettable:

“Apparently neutral’s protest is thoroughly discounted and ignored. Isman hard hit. Blockade issue affects pretext for embargo on by-products, ejecting suets and vegetable oils”.

Most censors would have skimmed it and moved on. But a savvy intelligence officer, armed with the right key, would have seen something else entirely. By taking the second letter of each word, a chillingly important message emerges: “Pershing sails from NY June I”.

This is the elegant deception of the null cipher, a method of hiding messages not through complex mathematical scrambling, but by burying them in plain sight. In the world of null ciphers, the secret isn’t in the letters you read, but in the vast majority of them you’re told to ignore.

The Art of Hiding in Plain Sight

A null cipher is a form of steganography—the practice of concealing a message within another, non-secret message or object. Unlike traditional cryptography which encrypts a message into an obvious, unreadable code, a null cipher’s first line of defense is to not look like a code at all. The entire cover text is the “ciphertext”, and the real message is a tiny, hidden thread woven into its fabric.

The “key” in a null cipher isn’t a password for decryption, but rather a rule for extraction. This rule tells the recipient which characters are significant and which are “nulls”—meaningless filler designed to distract and obscure. The beauty of this method lies in its simplicity and versatility. The rule can be almost anything the sender and receiver agree upon:

• The first letter of every word.
• The third word of every sentence.
• The letters immediately following a punctuation mark.
• Letters at intervals determined by a pre-agreed pattern (e.g., after 3 words, then 5, then 2).

For example, a simple message like “MEET AT DAWN” could be hidden in a note that reads: “My elephant eats too much! Always thinking about dinner. And what’s new”? The cover text is silly, but it’s grammatically correct and hides the message perfectly using the “first letter of each word” rule.

Whispers from History’s Pages

The null cipher is as old as the desire for secrets itself. Its simplicity made it a favorite tool for spies, prisoners, and plotters long before the digital age.

One of the earliest and most common forms is the acrostic, where the first letter of each line spells out a word or phrase. Ancient poets and scribes used this technique to embed names or dedications into their work. In a more clandestine context, an acrostic could turn a harmless-looking poem into a vital piece of intelligence.

History provides more dramatic examples. During the English Civil War, Royalist Sir John Trevanion was imprisoned by Parliamentarian forces in Colchester Castle. As the story goes, a message was smuggled to him in the form of a letter from a friend. The text seemed innocuous, full of pleasantries and mundane news. The secret key, however, was to read only the third letter after every punctuation mark. This revealed the simple but life-changing instructions for his escape, which he successfully followed.

These historical examples highlight the cipher’s core strength: it relies on a shared secret context between two people, a context invisible to the outside world. To an observer, it’s just a letter, a poem, or a business telegram. There is no jumble of letters to raise suspicion, only the quiet hum of ordinary language.

The Linguist’s Dilemma: Weaving the Cover Text

While the concept is simple, executing a good null cipher is a significant linguistic challenge. The creator must become a writer, a poet, and a cryptographer all at once. The primary goal is to make the cover text sound completely natural. A stilted, awkward, or nonsensical message is as much a red flag as a traditional coded message.

Consider the German spy message again. Words like “Apparently”, “neutral’s”, and “protest” are chosen not just for their meaning, but because their second letters are ‘p’, ‘e’, and ‘r’. The writer must seamlessly string these specially-chosen words together into a coherent sentence. This creative constraint can lead to unusual word choices or slightly strange phrasing. An alert censor might notice that the text, while grammatically correct, just feels… off. This “unnaturalness” is the Achilles’ heel of a poorly constructed null cipher.

The process is a delicate balancing act. The message must be hidden securely, but the cover text must be boring enough to escape scrutiny. It is a testament to the flexibility of language that such messages can be created at all, turning sentence structure and vocabulary into the very components of a lock and key.

From Parchment to Pixels: The Modern Null

You might think null ciphers are relics of a bygone era, but their core principle—hiding a signal in noise—is more relevant than ever in the digital world. The modern successor to the null cipher is digital steganography.

Instead of using words and sentences as the “noise”, modern techniques use the massive amounts of data in digital files. The most famous example is Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganography in images.

Here’s how it works on a conceptual level:

1. Every pixel in a digital image is represented by numbers that define its color (e.g., values for Red, Green, and Blue).
2. Changing the last digit, or “least significant bit”, of one of these color values alters the color so slightly that it’s completely imperceptible to the human eye.
3. By systematically altering the LSB of thousands of pixels across an image, you can embed a huge amount of data—text, files, anything—without visibly changing the picture.

In this scenario, the original image is the cover text. The secret message is the binary data you’ve hidden inside. And the “nulls”? They are the millions of unchanged, significant bits that make up the image, providing the perfect camouflage. Just as with a classic null cipher, someone looking at the image file sees only a photograph. Only someone who knows *how* and *where* to look can extract the hidden message.

The Meaning in the Noise

From a prisoner’s desperate letter to a hidden message in the pixels of a family photo, the null cipher reminds us of a fundamental aspect of communication: meaning is a matter of context and attention. It proves that a message can be shouted silently, its power derived not from what is said, but from the unspoken agreement on what to ignore.

It’s a powerful lesson that extends beyond codes and spies. In our own lives, we are constantly filtering information, deciding what is signal and what is noise. The null cipher is the ultimate expression of this process, a beautiful and cunning game where the most important words are the ones hidden behind the curtain of the mundane.