Re: VMs: Baptista/Matteo Argenti's essays on crypto - RANT

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Philip,

At 21:36 26/01/2004 +0000, Philip Neal wrote:
> Equally, the Rugg theory, if true, involves considerable ingenuity: I only 
> wonder
> if it is not too sophisticated a method of deceiving a gullible man like 
> Emperor
> Rudolph.

Actually, from the way Gordon currently describes his method, I'd say it's 
actually not yet sophisticated enough to produce what we see. So: if true, 
the actual method would have to be even more sophisticated (which would 
make its use by Kelley or others even more improbable).

If I wanted to deceive someone with a VMs (small alphabet) code, I'd 
probably just use four dice and a table containing (say) 10 unique 
characters and 11 overlapping verbose cipher characters (like qo, ee, dy, 
ol, or). This alone should produce a fascinating blend of apparent 
randomness and apparent structure sufficiently tricky ("it must be 
meaningful!", they cried) to keep cryptanalysts busy for, ooh, a couple of 
centuries, if what's happened with the VMs is any guide. But it's still 
miles short of the VMs! :-o

It's to the VMs' maker's immense credit that its subtlety makes 
reconstructing it non-trivial, either with syllable tables or dice etc. 
Clever b-st-rd! :-)

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


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list