Re: VMs: VMS Lookalike encipherment

[Knox Mix <knoxmix@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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[Jeff Haley: One method that would achieve this effect is to first strip 
all spaces from the plaintext and break it into groups of alphabetically 
ordered strings.]

KM: That is an interesting concept.
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[Jeff Haley: The dead letters are nulls. I can't say this is definately 
the way a medieval cryptographer would have done it but it is simple. 
The nulls would have masked the meaning a little.]

KM: This, along with the alternate substitutions, should reduce the 
number of chains/phrases/repeated-word-series that are transferred from 
plaintext to ciphertext, which is needed (not forgetting Marke's 
chains). At the same time, it would leave bigrams and the amalgamated 
trigrams-to-bigrams intact, also needed. I do not know whether some CT 
trigrams would be sufficiently increased and others reduced.
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[Jeff Haley: The word chol is very common in the manuscript so it was 
assumed at this time that the group cho was not in fact a verbose group.]

KM: But *Ao* in the table is considered a verbose group (VG)?

If *cho* and *ol* are VG's, *chol* would always be understood by an 
intended reader as *cho+ol* because there is no *chool* -- discounting 
at least three such strings in the Takahashi transcription in favor of 
the Majority Vote. The same could apply to other letters. That leaves 
*iii* ambiguous unless the glyphs can be interpreted differently (as 
they have been). In that scheme *eee* would have to be a VG distinct 
from *e* and *ee*. All conjectural on my part. Might fit in somewhere.

The trouble with n-grams for me is that letters overlap. *Ao* leaves *r* 
and *l* standalones. I would guess, though, that the fewer resultant 
VG's, the better. (?)  I was only able to reduce the number of 
substitutions to around 60 or 65 by using any consistent method.

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[Jeff Haley: I do not believe however that decipherment would be 
impossible as the choices are binary.]

KM: Maybe. If there are not too many. Ambiguity was not unknown in 
certain types of script. You might be able to remove some of it. This 
experiment might also lead to reduced ambiguity re. Latin, as well:
[Elias Schwerdtfeger: Eventually I'll try other tables to encrypt german 
or english text,]
Another script to decipher would be helpful and show how much ambiguity 
there might be in a long text.

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[Jeff Haley: Only time will tell.]

KM: Many hurdles to jump yet. In any event, tying all this together is 
good work.

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