Encryption � A Simple But Practically Unbreakable Trick

yeah me too.

I often enjoy doing crytogram or crytoquote puzzles in the newspaper or in a crossword puzzle book, but this doesn’t seem to bear any resemblence to those puzzles.

for all of you who had a hard time understanding that, u better go back to kindergarten – come on – this is baby stuff! (ya right!)

zeeskite – for a 9 yr. old, you have a pretty sophisticated vocabulary. very impressive.

The substitution cipher you describe is about 2000 years old. Julius Caesar used it.

During WWII the Nazis used a much enhanced version called Enigma that thankfully had a few critical flaws that enabled the Brits to break the code.

Modern codes are based on all sorts of complex math that is way over my head.

I can only try – you would still have to solve the issue of communicating the “shared key” in a non secure environment. classic cryptography issue, g’luck

Zach, the main flaw was the fact that the allies got hold of it before the war started. They had to keep it a secret and even let soldiers die so as not to give the Germans reason to believe they were hacked.

Here’s another system. Open a large bitmap picture in a byte editor and replace every twelfth bytes with the byte of your letter.

Or get the byte values of your message, multiply them by a predestined number, encode it in base64, then multiply again, encode in utf8, and so on.

I can only try-

The advantage to the method you mentioned in your opening post is that it can be decoded by hand.

I read a story in an old book about the FBI from the mid 1950s (sorry if that makes you old) about a paper boy who got paid a Nickel that felt different. It turns out that it was hollow with the front and back being from two different years. Anyway, inside the nickel there was an encrypted message that the FBI couldn’t figure out. (They knew it was from the Soviets from the precision that the two halves fit together.)

When they finally got to the bottom of the case it turns out that it was encoded with a similar technique that you mentioned above.

Modern encryption nowadays uses mathematical functions that have no inverse function. Public Key/ Private Key methods uses prime numbers. While there are various methods to test the primality of a number, one will only know if it is prime or not, not what the factors are. One can easily take two long primes and multiply them together while it could take a hacker months or years to factor the product.

(The details on how this works is beyond the scope of this thread. If you are interested in a real life working example please let me know.)

Another method I used to use when I was younger is Matrix Encryption, and this can be done by hand. The way it works is an invertible 3 X 3 matrix is used to encode a message and the message is decoded by finding the inverse of the matrix and multiplying it by encoded message.

When my younger brother was in camp he mentioned that he thought it was nosy that the office staff would read the faxes that came in so he asked me to encode them. At the beginning of each fax I would tell him which matrix to use. He loved all the attention he was getting as his bunk would watch him meticulously decode the message claiming it was extremely sensitive information.

He had to leave camp a few days early that year so on his last day I send a fax that said “Urgent, Please deliver to Moshe Pepper Immediately.

Our Cipher has been compromised, abort mission immediately and leave camp at once… He got a kick out of it.

“The effort to crack Enigma had two prongs – the Bletchley Park computers were working to decrypt it, and others were trying to capture a machine intact. Both groups succeeded. Polish codebreakers actually get the credit for first cracking Enigma.”

The Polish codebreaking is an interesting story, and I believe (IMHO) it is also the origin of the term of “doing something the Polish way”.

Poland was anticipating an invasion by the Nazis and was therefore extremely motivated to crack their coded messages (more so than England and other countries who were also working on it at the time but were not in imminent danger of invasion yet). They set up teams to crack the Enigma code, and succeeded initially. The irony is that the supervisor of the code breaking team had a copy of the book containing the daily “keys” but did not let anyone know. He felt that if he let it be known that he had the code book the code breakers would not learn how to crack the code and he needed them to learn those skills just in case his spy stopped providing the keys.

Sure enough, the source dried up and breaking the Enigma code was only possible through the brute force method. Unfortunately, this happened at the same time that the Germans increased the difficulty of the Enigma encryption (out of paranoia) and the code breakers were unsuccessful from that point on.

(As told by Simon Singh)

Urgent, Please deliver to Moshe Pepper Immediately.

Hey, I know Moshe Pepper! Is that your brother’s real name?

Avichai?

The Moshe Pepper I know has an older brother Avichai, so I guess I don’t know your brother.

I’m pretty sure he’s not.

I do know Pfeffers who are kohanim though. Could that have been the same name once?

I happened to remember it. I think the better question is what made Mother in Israel think to associate Pepper to Pfeffer. I would tend to think it is somewhat rare that a Pfeffer became a Pepper at Ellis Island. But MiI says her Pfeffer’s are Kohanim, so the question at hand is what’s the relation.

I can only try-

You may have heard of this American defector. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

34 years ago today Gary Powers got killed when the helicopter he was flying ran out of fuel.

(I remember that you like thing from “Today’s Date In History”.)