Re: VMs: A cryptological assault on Strong's decryption...

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Elmar,

At 17:49 13/08/2004 +0200, Elmar Vogt wrogt:
> In a nutshell: You prepare a number of subtitution alphabets, calling them 
> "1", "3", "5" etc. For every word, I encode my letters according to the 
> current alphabet. At every half-space, I proceed to use the next alphabet 
> in the "135797531474" sequence.

Just about right: perhaps simpler not to worry about the concept of "word" 
and say "encode your letters according to the current alphabet indicated in 
the sequence, but at every [half-]space click the pointer within the 
sequence forward by one position".

I'd guess that GC would probably claim that (on Herbal pages, at least) the 
number of distinct elements in the image is supposed to "seed" the initial 
position in the magic key sequence: but I think it's far safer to do a 
brute-force cryptological search, just in case the encoder happened to get 
it wrong on that page. :-o

> (I'm not quite sure if "1", "3", "5" etc. are supposed to be randomly 
> scrambled substitution ciphers, or if it's supposed to be a regular 
> subsitution of "move 1/3/5 ... characters forward in the alphabet to reach 
> the corresponding code letter from the plaintext letter." -- And wouldn't 
> the latter be equivalent to a Vigenere cipher?)

AIUI, Strong's magic key corresponds to a 12-cycle sequence of six 
independent (ie unshifted) alphabets (although, as with any undisclosed 
cipher claim, I could well be wrong). Strong noted that he had not 
determined the contents of all the alphabets, so one can only reasonably 
conclude that this was not a Vigenere-style (single alphabet with a cyclic 
permutation) system.

> In any case... I'd expect such a system to arrive at a much more uniform 
> and pseudo-random ciphertext than we actually observe. Not to mention the 
> sequences of similar and identical words.

It doesn't tally with what I'd expect either, but that doesn't mean that 
you shouldn't try to follow it through (as GC has done) to see if it 
produces the kind of cleartext Strong claimed. I think the first step, 
however, would be to see if you can see the statistical signature of 
alphabet 7 in action...

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


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