Re: VMs: A comment on Jacques Guy's table

["PK#01" <pklist01@xxxxxxxxx>]

One strong candidate (clearly visible in many of the Tranchedino
> > ciphers recently scanned and posted so kindly by Petr Kazil) is what we
> > call "verbose ciphers" - ciphers which try to mislead code-breakers by

I'll try to finish the Tranchedino posting next tuesday, because I want to
return the expensive book as soon as possible.

However, the other book about Papal cryptography - that's too fragile to
scan - has a lot of interesting ideas. In later years the Vatican didn't use
phantasy character sets anymore, but switched to numbers entirely. Usually
they kept all the old mechanisms intact - multiple caesars, nulls, syllable
codes, nomenclators.

1)

But there are also ideas like this one:

M A R I O
0 5 6 7 8   -1

p q s t u
4 0 5 7 6  - 2

z b c d e
8 7 5 6 0  - 3

f g h l n
3 0 4 5 6  - 9

mira = 10 7 6 5

il granduca = 17 95 0 16 5 96 36 26 35 15

This is a cipher datable to 1580, and it was described by Matteo Argenti.

2)

Then there is mention of ciphers with several alphabets twhere one alphabet
would be used for a few lines and then "after a sign that is apparent only
to the initiated" the second alphabet would be used and so on.

What I mean to say is that apparently the concept of "state" and "state
transitions" was widely known and used in cryptography. This means that
Markov-chains, statistical-correlations and clustering approaches might all
bring us nearer to a solution.

Then it says  Leo Baptista Alberti died in Rome in 1472. He wrote a treatise
on cryptography that is older than Cicco Simonetta's treatise (1474 Milan).
Matteo Argenti is his (grand?) son and he was still practicing cryptography
in 1605. BTW - Vigenere visited Rome in 1549 and 1566-67.

3)

Then there is mention of a system described by Jakob Silvester (Rome 1526)
which is a code book like:

   1/2       3/4       5/6        7/8
a  ape       bat       cat        day
b  adam      bet       cattle     dog
c  all       borrow    code       doodle
d  allways   brought   cucumber   driver
e  almost    brunch    ...        dumb

Then there were special signs for:

plural / singular
masuline / feminine / neutral
first, second third person
nominativ, accusativ etc. (I forgot my latin grammar long ago)

My guess is that a system like this would yield a rich vocabulary of highly
structured "words". I can't go into the detail by the author gives one
example:

bona consilia faciunt dominos beatos
II 1 3 19 g dd VI 10 n s ** IIII 8 II 15 k bb - or, using the alternatives
in the code:
Af 1 Dl 19 d dd Ba 10 n s ** Cl 8 Af 15 k bb

So, IMO we have a whole lot of "generation mechanisms" to think about, more
than just cardan grilles, and we have to consider that the mechanism could
be more complicated than we think.

I have no idea if we could decode any of the examples above.

My gut feeling is that mechanism 3) would be able to produce a lot of VMS
characteristics.




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