Giovanni Soro
Venetian cryptographer
Giovanni Soro (Venice, ? - 1544) was an Italian professional code-cracker. He was the Renaissance's first outstanding cryptanalyst and the Western world's first great cryptanalyst. Soro is known as the father of modern cryptography.
Career
Soro was employed in Venice in 1506 by the Council of Ten as cipher breaker-in-chief. They were the first secret service specializing in codebreaking. Soro ran the cryptanalysis operation in secret as the cipher secretary. Soro's tasks included deciphering secret messages captured from the messenger spies of Venice's rivals. At the time, Venice was plagued by espionage and subterfuge. The Council of Ten had its own ciphers changed often so as to impede competitors such as François Viète, a French mathematician (the father of modern algebraic notation).
“Giovanni Soro” enters the record as venetian cryptographer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Giovanni, Soro and Venetian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Giovanni Soro” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.