The Musings Of The Consensus

In an earlier post, I was of the opinion this COVID-19 outbreak would sputter out a bit faster than it has, and I was wrong on that. However, I still stand by the contention humanity needs to remain calm and rational no matter what. Yes, it's deadly if you fall into certain risk groups especially. Yes, it's quite communicable, and yes, there is no easily common cure for it yet, these are all facts. However, some things that are still worth keeping in mind. 1. Viral outbreaks have yet to cause the end of humanity. The worst-ever outbreak of plague in the Western world was the Black Death, and that never managed to wipe out all of humanity. The Spanish Flu killed a lot of people, but it was less deadly, and thus far this COVID-19 has proven several orders milder than that. Therefore, there is no sense losing our minds believing the end is nigh. Humanity will survive this unless we all decide to destroy ourselves with our own panic and paranoia. 2. Anyone making life har...

While reading up on the cryptology profession, I noted some particularly facepalm-worthy things that made me laugh hard at the sheer fail, and since I've always considered history to be a rich mine of comedy, here are some of my favorite moments of utter fail in the cryptological arena of human history. Battle of Tannenburg - World War I was a pretty dumb war because everyone in it was fighting for some really narrow-minded objectives that clashed hard with reality, with the Russians having a reason that amounted to an alliance with France they should have ignored and a hurt ego they wanted to assauge, but they fought anyway and we got the USSR in replacement of the Tsars. In cryptology, they screwed up this major battle hard because they were lazy and sent messages in cleartext even though it was no secret the Germans were not ashamed to read other people's mail and this entire battle was an utter failure on their part because the Germans knew exactly what they were doin...

In a previous post, I created a computer-based cipher usable from a spreadsheet program , but that cipher only included letters. Below is an expanded version that also includes numerical ciphering capability. (with numbers 1-9, with 0 at the end) This one follows the same basic rules as the previous cipher, but with the punctuation marks not included. Letters can be placed where that would go, such as for commas, according to any additional rules the cipher maker wishes to specify if that is needed. The table below is again a sample set of tables that can be randomized and expanded as needed for security, so long as all the rules of the base cipher are still adhered to. While still reasonably secure, this cipher can be strengthened by having each row mix the numbers and letters at random on each line, as opposed to having the letters than numbers mixed as seen below. Otherwise, knowledge numbers are used to encrypt other numbers alone may provide a hint to break the cipher shield...

When I designed my spreadsheet cipher, I examined several classical cryptographic systems and decided I wanted to have many of their strengths and very few of their weaknesses while still leaving it easy for a single person to encrypt and decrypt. What my method does and does not have are the following. 1. No cipher block limit. The cylindrical cryptograph of Etienne Bazeries had twenty discs with twenty-five letters on the outer rim of the discs. Thomas Jefferson's wheel cypher had thirty-six discs with twenty-six letters on rims. The strip cipher of Parker Hitt had twenty-five discs and letters, though the non-cylindrical version could be enlarged with as many additional lines of ciphertexts whenever desired and the position of each ciphertext was not fixed like on the cylinder version. A common flaw in all these methods is the overreliance on the imposed limits. For example, the Hitt cipher could only decrypt twenty-five characters of any ciphertext before you had to use ...

I've been reading up on cryptology for a while, so I thought I'd try my hand at making a cipher of my own, just for fun. It's not anywhere as secure as modern-day cipher systems, my version is a modified variant that borrows elements from several classical ciphers that have fallen out of regular use, but that all said, I designed this cipher to be fairly secure and easily usable for anyone with access to a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc . Now, a little background. It's a polyalphabetic (uses more than one series of letters in several rows) substitution cipher with a key system similar to that used by the M-94 and M-138 that were the brainchild of US Army officers Joseph Mauborgne and Parker Hitt. My version uses an altered variant of the alphabet tables used by Blaise de Vigenere, but I otherwise want to avoid the security flaws of the Vigenere system. I also decided to take some hints from the one-time pad system, particularly the German...