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Code and ciphers: Julius Caesar, the Enigma and the internet

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58<br />

chapter 5<br />

French cryptanalyst, Georges Painvin, worked out a method for doing it<br />

given a number of messages with identical plaintext beginnings or<br />

endings. Although only a few days were solved <strong>the</strong> number of messages<br />

on those days was high <strong>and</strong> <strong>the</strong>ir contents were particularly valuable. It is<br />

said that ‘On one occasion <strong>the</strong> solution was so rapid that an important<br />

German operation disclosed by one message was completely frustrated’<br />

[5.1].<br />

Example 5.5 (A Japanese naval cipher)<br />

During World War II <strong>the</strong> Japanese Merchant Navy used a cipher, known as<br />

JN40, in which each Japanese kana symbol was replaced by two digits<br />

from a 10�10 square. The individual digits were <strong>the</strong>n written into <strong>the</strong><br />

columns of a rectangle, <strong>the</strong> ordering of <strong>the</strong> columns being given by a transposition.<br />

The digits were <strong>the</strong>n taken out row by row, <strong>the</strong> ordering of <strong>the</strong><br />

rows being given by a second transposition. The transpositions were<br />

changed every day. The cipher was solved in November 1942 when an<br />

operator left some details out of a message <strong>and</strong> <strong>the</strong>n re-enciphered <strong>the</strong><br />

full text using <strong>the</strong> same keys [5.2].<br />

Problem 5.1<br />

An MDTM system with keyword ABSOLUTE <strong>and</strong> transposition 3-1-5-2-4<br />

has been applied to a message <strong>and</strong> <strong>the</strong> resulting cipher text is<br />

CFIGS FLTBC XKEEA EBHTB GLDPI<br />

Decrypt <strong>the</strong> message.<br />

Digraph to digraph<br />

Just as a simple substitution system replaces each individual letter of <strong>the</strong><br />

alphabet by a single letter so one can construct a system in which every<br />

digraph is replaced by two letters. The ‘obvious’ way of doing this, as has<br />

been indicated before, is to have a list of all 676 (�26�26) possible<br />

digraphs <strong>and</strong> <strong>the</strong>ir cipher equivalents e.g.<br />

AA�TK, AB�LD, AC�ER,..., ZX�DW, ZY�HB, ZZ�MS,<br />

but this involves having two lists, one for encryption <strong>and</strong> one for decryption,<br />

each 676 long, <strong>and</strong> although this would provide a better level of<br />

security than simple substitution it would be tedious to use. An alternative<br />

method is to use a digraph square which contains just <strong>the</strong> 25 letters of<br />

<strong>the</strong> alphabet, excluding J say, <strong>and</strong> form <strong>the</strong> cipher digraphs from <strong>the</strong>

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