Abstract
Even if a multitude of independent alphabets is used, periodic polyalphabetic encryption contains one element which is difficult to hide: the number of keys in the period of the encryption. This is based on the following stationariness property of stochastic sources: If P is a plaintext (of length M) from a source Q, then P(s), the plaintext P shifted cyclically by any number s of positions, is from the same source.
It may be laid down as a principle that it is never worth the trouble of trying any inscrutable cypher unless its author has himself deciphered some very difficult cypher.
Charles Babbage 1854
David Kahn 1967
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Literatur
William F. Friedman, Military Cryptanalysis, War Department, Office of the Chief Signal Officer. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Vol. I: Monoalphabetic Substitution Systems 1938, 1942. Vol. II: Simpler Varieties of Polyalphabetic Substitution Systems 1938, 1943. Vol. III: Simpler Varieties of Aperiodic Substitution Systems 1938, 1939. Vol. IV: Transposition and Fractionating Systems 1941. A copy is in the University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, PA.
W. Heath Robinson was a British cartoonist who drew magnificent and lovely but impractical machines for all possible and impossible tasks. There were copies of HEATH ROBINSON called PETER ROBINSON and ROBINSON AND CLEAVER—names of London department stores, and (Michie) also SUPER ROBINSON.
Said to be named after Rube Goldberg, American counterpart to Heath Robinson. Possibly an allusion to Emanuel Goldberg, an inventor of photoelectric sensing
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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Bauer, F.L. (2000). Periodicity Examination. In: Decrypted Secrets. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04024-9_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04024-9_17
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