Cipher | Decipher is an exhibition about using ciphers to keep secrets safe. Developed by the Canada Science and Technology Museum (CSTM) in partnership with the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), this travelling exhibition makes the complicated and serious subject of communications encryption accessible and fun. The thematically organized exhibition places historical and contemporary examples of secret keeping (and acquiring) side by side, and underscores the need for individuals, as well as states, to protect their communications.

Cryptology, the study of creating and cracking ciphers, is a tricky subject to address in an exhibition. Not only are the ideas often difficult, but many of the contemporary concepts are locked inside black boxes or hidden in the ether. In Cipher | Decipher, colourful illustrations stand in for impenetrable digital technologies and explain complex events and situations. Interactives help clarify some of the tough concepts. In Got a Secret?, the exhibition’s introduction, visitors puzzle through the basic parts of a cipher on a giant cipher wheel. Here, the cipher algorithm (the process for scrambling a plain text message) is shifting the alphabet so that one letter substitutes for another, and the cipher key (the parameters for the process) determines by how much the alphabet shifts.

The body of the exhibition – Secret Messages – considers secrets both from the perspective of those attempting to keep communications confidential and those seeking to uncover other people’s private messages. In keeping with the CSTM’s special position as an institution that demystifies how things work while demonstrating their cultural and historical significance, this section breaks down technological mechanisms in the context of why visitors should care about them. Secret Messages features artifacts that visitors will likely have heard of, but only seen in films and books. Made famous by Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley in The Imitation Game, the Enigma is a complex electro-mechanical cipher machine used by Germany to protect top-secret communications during the Second World War. In our exhibit, to untangle the workings of this cipher machine, visitors trace how the Enigma scrambles messages on a nearby digital interactive. Deconstructed parts of Typex, a cipher machine with which Canada and Britain encrypted messages from the Second World War until the 1960s, accompany the Enigma and reveal the internal composition of these machines. All exhibited artifacts come from the CSE’s collection, which is not regularly accessible to the general public.