The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich manuscript-like ciphertext

Michael A. Greshko, 2025. Cryptologia.

Presents the Naibbe cipher, a verbose homophonic substitution that turns Latin or Italian into text with the Voynich Manuscript's unusual statistics, as evidence the manuscript could be a ciphertext.

Voynich ManuscriptArticledoi: 10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408Checked against the original0

What it's used for here

The book and the surveys treat it as the strongest current cipher proposal and test its predictions against the text's spelling-use coupling.

Cited by on this site 9 records

The Voynich Manuscript

The mystery article

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Reading Without a Key

The book, version 2.0

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Toward a Reading of the Voynich Manuscript

The March 2026 draft

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6 methods surveys

Cryptanalysis, mathematics, linguistics, mixed keys, inductive methods, encoding procedures

SRC

Cite it

Greshko, M. A. (2025). The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich manuscript-like ciphertext. Cryptologia. https://doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408

@article{greshko2025,
  author = {Greshko, Michael A.},
  title = {The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich manuscript-like ciphertext},
  journal = {Cryptologia},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408},
  note = {Published online 26 November 2025}
}

TY  - JOUR
TI  - The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich manuscript-like ciphertext
AU  - Greshko, Michael A.
PY  - 2025
JO  - Cryptologia
DO  - 10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408
ER  -

Greshko, Michael A.. “The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich manuscript-like ciphertext.” Cryptologia (2025). https://doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408.