Re: Binary Application Ciphers an Anomaly - Help Me Get it Right.

On Mar 28, 7:54 am, gordonb.za...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Gordon Burditt) wrote:
I don't think its feasible for western keyboard operators ( I envisage
these to be nothing more than good ordinary non-specialist office
workers) to be given large tracts of foreign plaintext for keying in
to an embedded crypto sysytem.  

You shouldn't be keying in foreign plaintext to an embedded crypto
system.  You should already have that data in machine-readable form
before you decided to send it to someone else.  If it's a document,
it should be in electronic form already before you need to send
it to the home office.

I believe the interface between the
keyboard operator and any foreign language should be a string of hex
that represents the plaintext file - this has to be prepared by a
language-orientated intermediary.

What happened to your fixation on decimal?

If it has to be typed, why shouldn't it be TYPED by a language-oriented
intermediary?  (and using something better than a hexadecimal-only
keyboard)  If the language only extends ASCII by a few accented
letters (say, Western European languages like French), then it's
probably easy to train someone to type those accented letters and
give them a better keyboard.  Openoffice allows me to "type" special
characters with a pull-down menu to select one with a mouse, even
with an ordinary US keyboard.  My guess is that Microsoft Office
allows the same thing.  Let the computer figure out what the UTF-8
code is.  You could also have a document with the special characters
relevant to a language, then cut-and-paste them as necessary.  Or
perhaps a lot of the accented letters could be inserted via
spell-check.

If it's something much different, like, say, Chinese, Japanese, or
Farsi, you'll need someone who can read the language.  And perhaps
a special keyboard.  Did you know that with a standard US keyboard
you can type every character code between 0 and 255, inclusive?  It
may not be intuitive or fast without a character chart, but it can
be done.

(In the West). An ASCII-based cipher such as we are both working on
should be used as a secure surrogate means of encrypting all other
languages in Unicode.

Why not an 8-bit-byte-based cipher?

To explain what I mean, the set of plaintext that represents the
particular interface is treated simply as a plaintext file of
hexadecimal digits and encrypted as such - i.e. a set of aphanumeric
characters from a 16-element  alphabet that are in truth hex digits
but are being treated as lexical words of characters for the time
being.

What's wrong with the set of plaintext that represents the particular
interface is treated simply as a plaintext file of 8-bit bytes and
encrypted as such - i.e. a set of bytes from a 256-element alphabet
that are in truth bytes of UTF-8 multibyte characters but are being
treated as lexical bytes of characters for the time being.  All those
files of ASCII characters don't have to be changed.

The implications are enormous - one ASCII-based crypto system in the
west is usable on all Unicode - while being an element of Unicode
itself to all other countries - each country repeats the same ploy but
in its own information interchange system i.e. it uses its own set of
code points as a secure surrogate sytem when communicating to other
countries -  plaintext per se is never used and key boards remain
unchanged.

You do not get to redefine plaintext.  You also have to assume that at
some point an encrypted document gets turned into plaintext and
is actually *USED* for something, just like the non-secret stuff, so
you want it in electronic form.

Hi,

ASCII just happens to be a convenient ready-made enumeration type that
comes with the Ada programming language as standard in the Ada
reference Manual. It is also the national standard in America.

I can create a totally different enumeration type of any magnitude
that will replace ASCII if I wish and the attributes 'Pos and 'Val
will enable me to read and write to it as usual. I am not dependent
on ASCII or indeed any standard. I can use it to encrypt pictures and
music or indeed any other data very easily. It is possible to write a
totally new package in this language to do almost anything - that
includes a dedicated communications package containing an enumeration
type for any other country that uses Unicode - it is a very powerful
language - it is 'owned' by the US government

These dedicated packages are very manageable behind the scenes in the
infrastructure management sphere. - adacrypt

- it is also saliently bug free which is ideal for secure
communications. - adacrypt
.

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