The Puzzle Box: A Novel

by Danielle Trussoni

Gupta rolled his eyes. “The cryptex, indeed! You know as well as I that the cryptex is a totally fictitious flight of fancy, Mr. Brink, the work of a clever writer, not a puzzle maker. Leonardo da Vinci never created such a device, didn’t draw it, probably never even imagined it. But there is someone who did imagine a real cryptographic box: the ingenious Lu Ban, who lived from 507 to 444 B.C. A carpenter and engineer, he was also an expert weapons designer. He called his boxes ‘defensive boxes.’ They were, in essence, one of the earliest attempts at securing privacy, a primitive ZK-rollup if you will, some two thousand years before Da Vinci. A Japanese puzzle maker in the nineteenth century would have surely used Chinese mechanical puzzles as his model, Lu Ban’s boxes most likely.”