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How to Send Secret Messages

by Rusty Leo - August 03, 2019

Introduction:
How do you deliver a super secret message to someone? Meet the person and tell them. In case they are far away, then send this message through some mediator and make him to deliver to the recipient. What if the mediator is not trust worthy or complete messed up, that he reads it or deliver to a wrong person. In that case, our message should be clear but nobody should be able to it understand it other than you and your recipient. Whatever be the shortcuts you remember right now to achieve it is called encryption.

History:

Encryption is not new, it is dated back to Stone Age. Even Stone Age man draw food source location in symbols with non-custom doodles in order to protect it from potential competitors. One major example is, 2nd million BC clay disc “Phaistos Disc”.
Even with our current technology, still we are trying to decipher it. But well known recorded ciphering is Ceascer’s Cipher which is used in 1st century BC. Alphabets were shifted by 3 characters backward and send to the sender. In that case, is unauthentic user tried to tried to read the message, it will look like garbage data. But only the people know how to cipher can understand the code behind that. You can read more about this ciphering here.

Childhood Game:
I remember when I was kid, used to play this encryption game. It goes like this English alphabets will be arranged in the table as follows. Each box has two characters, first one will be defined with the box shape and second character will be identified with box shape and a dot. Last week I have posted a picture in our Instagram page with this message, if you decipher that message, you will be find like this, “Our next episode is on Encryption”. 

 Flaw in Encryption:
But this encryption has a major flaw so as Ceaser algorithm. Because English language has a pattern of speech, that is, character “E”, will get used very often. If I track down often used character from the message, that I can consider as “E”, 
it will open up most to the characters in the message. Similar to hangman puzzle. Other flaws are, Q will always go with U, In a sentence, 2 same letter exist, that most probably “L”s. Using this technique, people can partially decipher it, remaining can be guessed easily. The main reason for this flaw is character distribution in English language. Characters should be evenly distributed in order for it to make it complicated.

 Cipher Disc:
See this cipher sheet, which I have created for this episode. Simply take 5 circle discs like this name them/number them. I’ll tell you the reason later. If you pay a closer attention all these 5 discs has a-z alphabets. Using this we are going to encrypt. Move these wheels either in clockwise or anti-clockwise direction as per you’re wise. Once you are okay with the rotation, that’s it. No more movement. Freeze the disc positions. Not take your letter to be encrypted. Note down your initial position and disc numbers with $ and # symbols respectively. Find character by character and find the corresponding characters from the remaining discs from the other wheel, catch here is, you should mention the wheel number and character. Once it is written, you can send this to your friend If your friend knows how to decipher, simply he will take the disencumbers mentioned # section and set it as mentioned in $ section Then he/she can locate the disc number and and character, corresponding letter can be easily spotted. The advantage of this wheel is, for same letter you can define 4 different character.  It will distribute the characters across. In the meanwhile you can change your disc position but simply adding $ symbol. Not if you number around your word in a disc and create one new disc, that also can be used, it will be defined with # symbol, immediately your friend can change his disc to decipher it. It is a fun game to make. But this is again not a fail proof, because simply we are giving away the disc number, number of discs and dispositions. Descriptors can easily manipulate the character location using these information easily.

Voynich Manuscript:
Some people are interested in making others fool using ciphering, one of the well known cheating encryption can be found in Voynich manuscript, it is written in early 15th century AD, it is spotted in 1914 by a polish dealer. It has weird looking plants, animals and constellations and writing. Some believe it is written by some aliens, or some intelligent life form. But we are not sure who wrote it. With our current technology we are not able to decipher what exactly it is trying to say. Most of the cryptologist believe this it is some form of hoax, because in the 14-15th century people were overmuch eager to look for magic and supernatural things. So somebody might have written some non-sense and made money out of it. Fortunately I got hold of that book in PDF format, I have attached in this blog post. So if you feel that you can decipher it, download it from our "Share Point" section link here.



Encryption in Military:
In second world war time, very often people used encryption to pass the information around. The need for encryption was very crucial because if the information reached wrong hands, it could make a major impact in the phase of war. So Germans were using encryption a lot. their famous encrypting machine is called enigma machine. it had advanced mechanism like, initial seed, randomizer and decryption mechanism in a same system. You can learn more about this machine operation wiki and here. Each country had their own machine to send and receive messages from their troops. It is a interesting story. you can read more about these encryptor and it's functionality in the internet.

Conclusion:
If you want one more easy method, without any cipher wheel or any third party equipment nothing but a simple book. I have made a bonus video in Facebook, feel free to check that out. It is quite fine to play around ciphering and deciphering. If you enjoy reading it and wants to try by yourself, create one cipher wheel and post it in any social media and hash tag it with #rusty_diy" I’ll track them down and show it in the next rusty lab YouTube show. Thank you.

 Bonus Section:
How to send a encrypted message to your friend with only a simple book. Take a book as of your choice. Make sure that book has at least 500 pages like dictionary or encyclopedia. Then write down your message which needs to be encrypted. Once ready, find all the words in random pages on the book, note down the page number, row number and column numbers of each word. Now start cipher your message, start with that books ISBN number, then your message; word by word, though the word is same try to pick it from different pages, It will randomize the encryption. Page, row and column numbers needs to be separated as per you and your friend agree upon. In this case, if somebody sees this message, they will simply see the numbers, they will not be able to understand until they know the encryption algorithm. 
This one of the easy way to send message to different part of the world easily (through email). Simply the other person has to order the book from amazon using ISBN number and start decrypting the message. But not only this, the encryption is all about creativity and imagination, you can write your own logic and creativity inside to create your own protocol which can be shared with your friend. If you like this article, you may like our full episode of encryption in our YouTube channel. Feel free to visit by clicking the link below. If you have any encryption idea or encryption story feel free to register that in the comment section.
Watch the Facebook Video
<Click the Image to watch exclusive "Facebook" Video>
References:

Free Resources:
This week free stuff is "Voynich Manuscript" for your encrypting hunger. You can find the link to this book in the "Share Point" location. Or link is here.

YouTube Video:


Social Media Pages:

Others:
Hash Tag your new encryption ideas and DIYs with #Rusty_DIY.

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