{"paperId": "b208160de4cc7fb55d5e186563f3f001aa690cca", "externalIds": {"DBLP": "journals/cryptologia/Campanelli23", "DOI": "10.1080/01611194.2022.2116614", "CorpusId": 252443710}, "title": "A statistical cryptanalysis of the Beale ciphers", "venue": "Cryptologia", "year": 2022, "citationCount": 3, "openAccessPdf": {"url": "", "status": null, "license": null, "disclaimer": "Notice: Paper or abstract available at https://api.unpaywall.org/v2/10.1080/01611194.2022.2116614?email=<INSERT_YOUR_EMAIL> or https://doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2022.2116614, which is subject to the license by the author or copyright owner provided with this content. Please go to the source to verify the license and copyright information for your use."}, "authors": [{"authorId": "2289708634", "name": "Leonardo Campanelli"}], "abstract": "Abstract The encryption method used to encode the second Beale cipher leads to a \u03b5-Benford\u2019s distribution for the first significant digit of the numbers in the coded message. The relative level of deviation from Benford\u2019s law, \u03b5, is about 0.15 for the second decoded cipher. The other two undeciphered codes show a statistically significant deviation from a 0.15-Benford\u2019s law, suggesting that either ciphers 1 and 3 are fake or the encryption method used to encode them is different from the one used for cipher 2."}