Re: VMs: Personal Guess

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi GC,

At 18:45 05/08/2003 -0500, GC wrote:
> In some ways my views are closer to Nick Pelling's as to
> construction and technique.  I am at this point uncertain as to whether the
> entire text is mathematically recoverable.  Portions may have to be
> recovered through context, leaving some ambiguity.

Anything involving abbreviation (as I suspect the VMS to be) is likely to 
be fully recoverable only through close contextual analysis and sheer 
perseverance - so, breaking the (outer) coding system here could well be 
merely the beginning of an entirely different story.

However, numerous private shorthand systems have (as you know) been 
"cracked" in the past, so there would at least be a reasonable set of 
precedents to such a latter stage. :-)

> For whatever reason, a table of pairs was generated through polyalphabetic
> means.

I believe that the common pairs we observe were simply designed around <a-> 
and <o-> shift characters - something like Vigenere's Alphabeth 
Northmanique, but with the subtler idea of making <a-> and <o-> look like 
vowels in a simple monoalphabetic cipher. I really don't think you need to 
invoke polyalphabeticism or even the 231 Kabbalistic gates to explain these.

AFA Strong goes: he was an extremely clever guy, but I believe he looked at 
the VMS with a specific model of the history of cryptography in mind - 
that, if it wasn't a monoalpha, it had to be a certain kind of polyalpha - 
which over-coloured his analysis. I believe that Strong's external 
historical research also coloured his predictions of the content - and 
(FYI) that if he had seen more of the VMS, that he would probably have 
changed his mind.

Generally: you and I both see the VMS as a non-obvious polyalpha system - 
but please accept my caution that I think the VMS author is trying to 
sidestep our feeble post-1912 attempts at cryptology by misdirecting us, 
certainly at the letter level and probably elsewhere as well. For example, 
I would be completely unsurprised if the order of the letters within each 
word were transposed in some way - perhaps reversed.

FWIW, I see the VMS' coding system as an ingenious engine made up of 
(probably 10-12) simple components, each designed to remove a separate 
cryptological / statistical artefact.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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