ETOAN

ETOAN IRSHL DCUP FM WY BGV

Okay, so it's not quantitative, but it's how I remember the relative frequency of letters in the English language, and it serves to explain why I chose this domain name.

Here's some more detail on statistical occurences of letters in the English language.

Letter Percent

E 13

T 9

O 8

A 8

N 7

I 7

R 7

S 6

H 6

L 4

Letter Percent

D 4

C 3

U 3

P 3

F 3

M 2

W 2

Y 2

B 1

Letter Percent

G 1

V 1

K <1

Q <1

X <1

J <1

Z <1

So, in set of 100 letters of English text, on average 13 of them would be 'E', 9 would be 'T', and so on.

GENERATING RANDOM NUMBERS

Click here for an explanation of my set-up to generate random numbers from a common radioactive source.

If you're looking for alternatives, here is a simple electronic number generator from 1976. I would not recommend it for serious cryptographic use, but it's neat to build nonetheless.

REFERENCES

The Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot and Scott A. Vanstone is available on-line here.

The Cryptology ePrint Archive can be found here.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Computer Security Resource Center (CSRC) is here.

QUOTES

From the 1984 movie Repo Man:

Leila: Are you using a scrambler?
J. Frank: I can't hear you, I'm using a scrambler!

From the 1976 movie Midway:

Captain Garth: How much can you decipher?
Commander Rochefort: Fifteen percent...
Garth: Really decipher?
Rochefort: Ten percent.
Garth: That's one word in ten, Joe! You're guessing!
Rochefort: We like to call it "analysis."
(In reality, Commander Joseph J. Rochefort was the OIC (officer-in-charge) of the Communications Intelligence processing unit in Hawaii, part of OP-20-G, the Navy Radio Intelligence Section. He was in daily contact with Lieutenant Commander Edwin Layton, who was the intelligence officer for Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet. Layton later wrote a book entitled "And I Was There..." detailing his activities before and during World War II.)

From comedienne Elayne Boosler:

"I have six locks on my door all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three."

From the 1983 movie Never Say Never Again:

Bond: Commander Peterson, are you equipped with the new XT-7B's?
Peterson: That's Top Secret. How do you know about them?
Bond: From the Russian translation of one of your service manuals.

DIGRAPH FREQUENCY TABLE

ASCII digraph Relative Frequency
(e_ = 100.0) Reverse/Forward Ratio

e_ 100.0 10.6%

_t 76.7 54.5%

th 60.8 1.9%

he 57.5 0.2%

s_ 52.8 47.2%

_a 44.8 26.6%

t_ 41.8 183.4%

re 39.8 88.6%

in 37.2 9.1%

CRLF 36.9 28.1%

er 35.2 112.9%

d_ 32.9 56.3%

n_ 30.3 38.1%

_i 29.7 1.6%

an 28.5 19.4%

KERCKHOFF'S PRINCIPLES

Auguste Kerckhoffs' Principles:

The system must be physically, if not mathematically, undecipherable;
The system must not require secrecy and can be stolen by the enemy without causing trouble;
It must be easy to communicate and remember the keys without requiring written notes, it must also be easy to change or modify the keys with different participants;
The system ought to be compatible with telegraph communication;
The system must be portable, and its use must not require more than one person;
Finally, regarding the circumstances in which such system is applied, it must be easy to use and must neither require stress of mind nor the knowledge of a long series of rules.

INTELLIGENT NOISE

In the late 1970's a team of engineers in Seattle designed a secure telephone they called the PhasorPhone. Their attempt to have the design patented resulted in a secrecy order issued at the direction of the National Security Agency (NSA). Some brief exerpts from James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace describing the situation can be seen by clicking here.
Even TIME magazine ran a story about it in their October 2, 1978 issue. You can read a snippet here.
The original design of the PhasorPhone was prompted by an article entitled Intelligent Noise which appeared in the December 1962 issue of Analog magazine. You can read the article by clicking here.
The article makes reference to radar signals using pseudo-noise sequences, which likely refers to either
(a) MIT Lincoln Laboratory's high frequency NOMAC (NOise Modulation and Correlation) system, known under the Army Signal Corps production name F9C. NOMAC was a communications system using noise-like signals and cross-correlation detection. Papers describing this method and system date back to 1952; or
(b) the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) radio communication system called CODORAC (COded DOppler, Ranging, and Command) that became the basis for what is now the Deep Space Network (DSN).

ENCRYPTION TYPES

The Committee on National Security Systems (CNSS), in the National Information Assurance (IA) Glossary, CNSS Instruction No. 4009, defines the following four types of encryption systems:

Type 1 U.S. Classified
Cryptographic equipment, assembly or component classified or certified by NSA for encrypting and decrypting classified and sensitive national security information when appropriately keyed. Developed using established NSA business process and containing NSA approved algorithms. Used to protect systems requiring the most stringent protection mechanisms.
Type 1 products contain classified NSA algorithms.

Type 2 U.S. Federal interagency
Cryptographic equipment, assembly or component certified by NSA for encrypting and decrypting sensitive national security information when appropriately keyed. Developed using established NSA business process and containing NSA approved algorithms. Used to protect systems requiring protection mechanisms exceeding best commercial practices including systems used for the protection of unclassified national security information.
Type 2 products may not be used for classified information, but contain classified NSA algorithms.

Type 3 Interoperable interagency (Federal, State and Local)
Unclassified cryptographic equipment, assembly or component used, when appropriately keyed, for encrypting or decrypting unclassified sensitive U.S. Government or commercial information, and to protect systems requiring protection mechanisms consistent with standard commercial practices. Developed using established commercial standards and containing NIST approved cryptographic algorithms/modules or successfully evaluated by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NAIP).

Type 4 Proprietary
Unevaluated commercial cryptographic equipment, assemblies, or components that neither NSA nor NIST certify for any government usage. These products are typically delivered as part of commercial offerings and are commensurate with the vendor's commercial practices. These products may contain either vendor proprietary algorithms, algorithms registered by NIST, or algorithms registered by NIST and published in a FIPS.

(See also Federal Standard 1037C)

ENIGMA MACHINE SIMULATION

You can see a simulation of the World War II-era Enigma encryption machine in Flash here.

PAPER ENIGMA MACHINE

Mike Koss has put together a basic model of the Engima encipherment method using just a sheet a paper. You can read more about it here.

M-209 CIPHER MACHINE SIMULATION

Dirk Rijmenants has an excellent M-209 simulator for Windows here.
He also has an Enigma simulator here.

ENCRYPTION USED BY THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR

Question for the reader: are there any good references for details regarding the coding scheme used by the Knights Templar during the Middle Ages for their "letters of credit"?
By 1150, the Order's original mission of guarding pilgrims had changed into a mission of guarding their valuables through an innovative way of issuing letters of credit, an early precursor of modern banking. Pilgrims would visit a Templar house in their home country, depositing their deeds and valuables. The Templars would then give them an encrypted letter which would describe their holdings. While traveling, the pilgrims could present the letter to other Templars along the way, to "withdraw" funds from their account. This kept the pilgrims safe since they were not carrying valuables, and further increased the power of the Templars.
(from Wikipedia)

ACA COMPUTER SUPPLEMENTS

You can find the programs and data files associated with the American Cryptogram Association Computer Supplement by clicking here.

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Last updated May 1, 2009