Manual for the Solution of Military CiphersHitt, Parker
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Manual for the Solution of Military Ciphers
Hitt, Parker
Ciphers; Cryptography
| Fixed Alphabet of Text |
| ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRSTUVXYZABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRSTUVXYZ |
+------------------------------------------------------+
| PCJVRQZBAODFSUTMXIYHLGEN |
| Movable Alphabet of Cipher |
+-------------------------------------------+
Here A of the plain text is enciphered by S and the other letters come
as they will. If we move the cipher alphabet one space to the left,
A will be enciphered by U and the whole sequence of the alphabet will
be changed.
We will therefore use some such form as the above and see if we can
insert our letters, as they are determined, in such a way as to have
each of the cipher slips identical. We may start thus:
ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRSTUVXYZABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRSTUVXYZ
1st Alphabet t x
2d ol qei ms d c u
3d ol qei ms d c u
4th ol qei ms d c u
5th d c u ol qei ms
6th ol qei ms d c u
In the 1st alphabet, T and X are placed as A and E respectively on the
basis of frequency. In the 2d and 6th alphabets, O and E are placed as
A and E respectively on the basis of frequency. In the 4th alphabet,
E and S are placed as A and E, and in the 5th, D, U and L are placed
as A, E and O for the same reason. We now have an excess of E's and
a deficiency of A's, which will be corrected if, in the 3d alphabet,
we place L, I and C as A, E and O respectively. As a check, this
gives us TOLEDO as the key word.
In the second alphabet, O is four letters to the left of E; we may
place O four letters to the left of E in the fourth and it comes under
V. Note that in the fourth frequency table O (=V) does not occur. In
the same way in the fourth alphabet, S is four letters to the right
of E; placing it in the same position with respect to E in the second
and sixth, we have S under I. We have already noted that S probably
represents a vowel in these two alphabets. In this way, we may add
D and U to the third alphabet from their position in the fifth with
respect to L and we may add I and O to the fifth from their position
in the third with respect to L. In every case we check results from
the frequency tables and find nothing unlikely in the results.
Now in the second and sixth, let us try Q, D and U as D, N and R
respectively. We may add these letters to the third, fourth and
fifth alphabets by the method of observing the number of letters to
the right or left of some letter already fixed. We now add L to the
second, third, fourth and sixth from its position with reference to
D and U in the fifth. M is probably D in the fourth and we may add
it to each of the alphabets, except the first, in the same way. The
table is now complete as shown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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