Re: VMs: RE: GC's first reply

[Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Nick,

On Tuesday 08 July 2003 12:04, Nick Pelling wrote:
> Cicco Simonetta (arguably the father of modern cryptology), in his
> (admittedly short) "Regule ad extrahendum litteras ziferatas, sine exemplo"
> of 1474, gives a systematic set of rules for breaking monoalphabetic
> ciphers. This specifically relies on an understanding of statistical
> properties!

Yes, sure character frequencies, but not more than that. Entropy, word 
frequency distributions and all the rest were not available then.

> Overall, I think a cryptologist (even in the 15th Century) with a good
> feeling for the properties of language would be able to use pair ciphers to
> construct a realistic-looking interior language: and to a cryptologist,
> "realistic-looking" would (naturally) be with respect to its statistical
> properties.

Could be, did this happen, though?
I also agree with Gordon, that some of these statistical properties could 
arise as a matter of chance without the author knowing.

Cheers,

Gabriel


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