SCRAMBLED EGGS

From: Steven Smann (beejewel_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 05/31/04 

Date: 31 May 2004 04:17:42 -0700

For what it is worth...

I was playing around with cypher texts when I realized that the art of
encyphering text is a matter of removing some of the structure of the
plaintext and keeping it separated from the text.

By definition plain text has a structure and it is this structure that
enables us to quicly decipher it in our minds.

So by encrypting it according to some algorithm we are in effect
removing some of the structure from the text.

I then concidered what I would need to do to remove all the structure,
so I created an excel spread*** with cells for each letter and boxed
in a set of 8 x 15 cells and wrote the following plain text;-

H U M P T Y D U M P T Y S A T
O N T H E W A L L H U M P T Y
D U M P T Y H A D A G R E A T
F A L L A L L T H E K I N G S
H O R S E S A N D A L L T H E
K I N G S M E N C O U L D N O
T P U T H U M P T Y T O G E T
H E R A G A I N A B C D E F G

I then set out to create another set of cells adjacent to this and
started programming each cell from left to right in such a way that
all the letters were sorted alphabetically ie.. A1 = N2 etc.. and
ended up with this.

A A A A A A A A A A A A B C C
D D D D D D E E E E E E E E E
F G G G G G G H H H H H H H H
H F I I I K K L L L L L L L L
L M M M M M M N N N N N N N O
O O O O P P P P P P R R R S S
S S S T T T T T T T T T T T T
T T U U U U U U U W Y Y Y Y Y

As is easy to see, this cypher has no sensible structure at all, so
what I have achieved, is to separate all structure from the original
message. No crypto analyst could hope to decipher this text, because
the apparently random list of letters above should and could spell a
number of different things, so one could never be certain that one has
recovered the plaintext.

Now I can use my spread *** to build the reverse structure, by
copying the cypher text to a new space on my spread *** and one by
one programming it to re-assemble my original plaintext.

So now I have a set of cells that can convert the plaintext into
cypher and a set of cells that can convert the cypher into plaintext
and my key is HUMPTY DUMPTY ......etc alphabetically sorted.

Now all anyone needs to know is my key and that it is sorted
alphabetically.

My spread*** can now be used to encrypt any message and that message
will be just as secure as the cupher that resulted from Humpty
Dumpty.... Completely devoid of structure and as a result
indesipherable.

This message is done with the same key;

O S O A D M N B I A N C D N E
L E N L E F T N U A E C H A G
H S T Y T I I S S R T B R H B
R Y A G A T E A G O R I N N G
V R D A K U C O E F G A R B T
S N P E A E T F T K U C G S E
R M O M G N A B A A G T U T T
G E C E E A E I A I B G R S O

So allthough the above message looks as if it could be decyphered, it
probably can't, there is no structure for the crypto analyst to grab
hold of and it would be a complete waste of time.

Steven Sesselmann