Abstract
Moroccans have used Cryptography and Steganography since very distant times especially during the reign of the different dynasties in Morocco. They have used most of the methods of Arabic cryptography as methods of substitution and transposition. They had also used Al-Mo’tamid’s method of steganography, which consists of using a correspondence between a set of letters of the Arabic alphabet and a set of the bird names, and manipulate the names of birds instead of letters to encrypt a message hidden in poetry. In addition, before the end of the 16th century Moroccans had invented methods of cryptography and steganography as the method of digital cryptography used by King Al Mansour and which was based on use of the hash function “hissab Al Jommal calculation” and the factorization of integers. They had used also a grid filled with verses of poetry in the form of a chess table to crypt a letter by three digits representing the position of the letter in the grid. The poetry is thus the secret key that two people choose to exchange secret messages.
Between the 16th and the 19th century, there was intense use of the hash function “Hissab al Jommal calculation” to crypt numbers by letters and to crypt words by numbers as in the case where a number had used for the digital signature in the 18th century (signature in El-Malhoun poems). Similarly, Moroccans had used cryptography and Steganography for the security of financial and legal acts as in inheritance or marriage certificates.
This is an overview of some ideas used by Moroccans that we developed using the new computer technologies; however, there are undoubtedly many other ideas, to be found, in the old manuscripts.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Azakri, A.: Aerodah Programm determining Al Khalil Models for the Arabic Poetry. http://azahou45.free.fr/Accueil.htm
Al Iraki, A.: Ahmed El-Ghazal literary papers,
Imprimerie Info-Print, Fès Maroc (1999)Al-Kadi, I.A.: Origins of cryptology: the Arab contributions. Cryptologia 16(2), 97–126 (1992)
Azizi, A., Azizi, M.: Instance of Arabic cryptography in Morocco. Cryptologia 35(1), 41–51 (2011)
Azizi, A., Azizi, M.: Instance of Arabic cryptography in Morocco II. Cryptologia 37(4), 328–337 (2013)
Azizi, A.: Java cryptographical application based on Arabic poetry. In: 2012 IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Industrial Informatics, ICCSII 2012, 6454486 (2012)
Azizi, A.: Steganographical application based on Al Khalil Models of poetry. In: 2017 IEEE Joint International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Education and Training and International Conference on Computing in Arabic, ICCA-TICET 2017, 8095293 (2017)
Kahn, D.: The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing. Macmillan, New York (1967)
Mrayati, M., Alam, M.Y., At-Tayyan, M.H.: Arabic Origins of Cryptology, vol. 1–5. Published by KFCRIS and KACST, Riyadh (2003)
Tazi, A.: Les Codes Secrets des correspondances Marocaines à travers l’histoire. Librairie Almaarif Aljadida, Rabat (1983)
Shakiry, A.S.: Arabic Numerals. T.C.P.H. Ltd. Publisher, London (2009). Registration \(N\) 1645411
Imprimerie Info-Print, Fès Maroc (1999)Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Annex: Examples of Moroccan Manuscripts
Annex: Examples of Moroccan Manuscripts
The Sultan Al Mansour Manuscript: secret writing letters (end of the 16th century)
Fès Numbers Manuscript
Ahmad Al Ghazal(..-1777) Manuscript: coding using poetry in Morocco
Secret writing Manuscript for Telegram (end of the 19 century)
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Azizi, A. (2019). Arabic Cryptography and Steganography in Morocco. In: Carlet, C., Guilley, S., Nitaj, A., Souidi, E. (eds) Codes, Cryptology and Information Security. C2SI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11445. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16458-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16458-4_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-16457-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-16458-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)