• Completed • Classical Keys

[Raven Talius]

Timestamp: Saun 25th, 715th Arc

Often, The woman could be found with her nose buried in a book as she consumed the words written upon the pages bound within books. Searching for the secrets that the pages contained within, hoping to arm herself with the knowledge should the need ever arrived. One could never be too careful when someone was of noble birth. Not that she cared too much for her own title, for she was more interested in the secrets that the other lords and ladys held. The ones that they disguised in their letters and notes. Not to mention the encrypted secrets that books held in order to keep them from the wrong hands.

Fingers lightly glanced over the words as they poured from the book and a whisper caressed her lips in thought and in her ears the words seemed to echo in the Prime Atheneum, but alas they did not as the books surrounding her consumed the barely whispered words. ”In Cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encrypting by which units of plaintext are replaced with ciphertext, according to a fixed system; the "units" may be single letters - which is the most common; pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth. The receiver deciphers the text by performing the inverse substitution.”

A pause had her held in place for a moment as her eyes hovered over the next words and she gently slid the book slightly to the side, before she grasped her quill and dipped the nib into the ink pot that sat beside her upon the table. Quickly brandishing a crude piece of paper, the woman rested it upon the table top and quickly began to write.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
XYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVW

’A basic shift code that falls under the category of a substitution cipher. Often these cipher techniques are used as a basic first step in either decrypting or encrypting a message or text in a much more complex scheme to disguise the message hidden.’

Her quill hovered above the crude paper for a moment as the female pondered over the words that she had made note of. A basic first step? How often were there encrypted messages hidden inside an encrypted message? Then one had to wonder about the different levels of encryption used. If a substitution was a basic cipher, she was going to need to learn a great deal about the different levels of ciphers.

The substitution cipher was easy enough and she could probably solve it in her sleep. It was so basic that the woman figured that even someone who wasn’t an academic could solve it and it wasn’t at all very reliable on its own. Indeed, the basic shift code was child’s play and she wanted to know more than that, however, the female knew that everyone had to learn the basics otherwise it was pointless. Even when learning a language, the basics had to come first before the exciting bits and pieces. Slowly, Raven rolled her shoulders before she continued her writing.

’This simple substitution cipher is also known as the substitution alphabet cipher. It can be shifted, reversed or scrambled in a more complexed fashion in which it would be called a mixed alphabet. Mixed alphabets can be created by first writing out a keyword and then removing the repeated letters in it, then writing all the remaining letter in the alphabet in the usual order. This type of cipher is also known as a monoalphabetic cipher.’

This, she pondered, would make it a little more difficult if the letters were mixed, however, it still wouldn’t be at all difficult for an academic. A mind who was taught to analyse and think upon the issues presented before them. A sigh parted her lips as she lightly placed the quill down upon the desk beside her.

”Then there is the polyalphabetic substitution cipher, where multiple cipher alphabets are used, for example, the Vigenère square. With the square there is 26 different cipher alphabets that are used to encrypt text. Each cipher alphabet is just another rightward shift of the original alphabet.” The woman mumbled the book's words to herself as the candle flickered next to her in the dim light. Night time, she mused, was when people were less likely to visit and she was free to mumble to herself a great deal more. ”Basic stuff,’ Raven mumbled once more as she tapped her fingers against the wooden top.

Here is my little secret for you-

[Raven Talius]

Raven’s fingers grasped her quill once again, dipped the nib into the ink and began to write once more. The female layed out the Vigenere square upon her piece of paper and she paused for a moment as her snowy gaze waited for the ink to dry upon the paper. Next, she noted down the key word for her own reference mostly, but as a trial run.

Key: Darkness

However, the female couldn’t decide as to what she wanted to encrypt as a sample and she rested the quill upon the desk once more. Rising from her seated position, the female stretched before she looked at the problem before her at a different height. Being able to encrypt was just as important as decrypting but the female just didn’t think that she was ever going to actually eventually need to encode anything, aside from the fact that she would probably spend more of her time decrypting messages. A sigh parted her lips as she nudged the book over to the left a little more and she stared at the piece of paper for a moment. The page that held her recently taken notes. Only she would eventually review these notes again, but what if someone else bothered to read her notes? Tried to decrypt anything that she had encrypted upon this page?

A hum rippled over her lips before she shifted her position to seat herself back at the desk and her fingers picked up the quill once more. An encrypted message meant that whoever scribed it also had the ability to decrypt other messages. So whatever encryption Raven used, she was going to have to make sure that it’s better than an opposition’s decryption ability. A slow smirk caressed her lips then as she realised exactly what she was going to write using this basic encryption technique.

KAIO VW EQ OAKDYI KWFAVD SSJ QRA

The female chuckled softly at that before she shifted her position back to the book at hand and slid it back closer to her form. The next section covered transposition ciphers, where the letters were kept unchanged but scrambled to some well-defined scheme. The cipher reminded her of scramble eggs and something else parallel to scrambled brains. Why such a comparison popped up inside of her mind, she could only hazard a guess, but guessing wasn’t really apart of the equation when it came to randomised thought processes. She surmised and blinked as Raven realised that she had gone off point. Slowly, her gaze returned to the book in hand.

The book began to note that many of the transposition cipher used a geometric design and her head tilted a fraction to the right. Another popular transposition cipher was a columnar cipher, where the original message was arranged in a rectangle, from left to right but in some other languages, this rectangle could be arranged from right to left . Another tactic that other columnar ciphers used is the message is taken and written from right to left, down and up columns to scramble the letters. However, Raven noted that a tactic such as that, could easily be decrypted if an individual was to glance at the message at a certain way to notice the pattern presented before them in what she thought, was a rather obvious way.

Her hand lifted so then the end of the quill could caress the end of her nose in thought while she continued reading. Another step would be to choose a keyword, once the keyword has been chosen the letters of the keywords, needs to be assigned a number which is determined by its place in the alphabet. For example, A = 1 and so on. These numbers are assigned to a column. Then once the numbers have been assigned to a column the message is arranged into these columns. Once established, take the letters in numerical order to transcribe the encrypted message.

D,A,R,K
4,1,18,11
C,L,A,S,
S,I,C,A,
L,K,E,Y
S

LIKCSLSSAYACE

Well then, the Eidisi thought to herself, that is certainly a different basic cipher if she was ever in somewhat of a hurry. ”However, slightly time consuming and semi useless, She said to the large and mostly empty room.

Here is my little secret for you-

[Raven Talius]

They were musings of the noble woman, musings, that no one would pay any attention to if they were smart about it, for she wouldn’t be so kind if they were to butt their tiny little noses into it. After sparing a musing thought to the information that had been provided to her, the woman kept on reading the pages set before her, occasionally taking notes of the various substitution and transposition that could be used through different stages of ciphers. The candle flickered warning Raven that it would go out soon and snow eyes glared at it for a moment before she turned the page of the book she was currently reading. Most of it only covered everything that she had already surmised. The book pointed out that classical ciphers could be broken even if the attacker only knew a sufficient amount of ciphertext.

A sigh parted her lips as the Eidisi jotted down the last of her findings and made a note at the bottom of the page that summed up her findings about classical ciphers. As a side note, she jotted down that they were mostly useless for her own use, although only useful in certain situations to decrypt basic and lazy noblemen and women’s notes should she come across any. Raven also made a note that she thought that books should they ever be brought to her attention, would hardly be encoded with such a basic cipher, that a more complexed cipher would be used. In her opinions, that if books should exist then perhaps they could potentially contain dangerous knowledge, but the female surmised that she could be wrong, as it was only an educated guess after all.

Although if a book with a cipher that was difficult to crack, one would think that it would be dangerous to possess or even to fall into the hands of someone else which would be why anyone would use a difficult to almost impossible cipher to crack. Almost impossible, the Talius surmised, because there will always be someone out there with a mind to crack any code. And I aim to be the top mind in the field, Raven mused to herself as she paused for a moment of brief reflection about the topic before her. That was until she closed the book with a soft, thud. That would be it for the night, the female surmised as she rose from her position at the table while the candle flickered to die out on her.

Quietly, Raven stoppered the vial of ink and began to gather up her things to tuck away into her bag, of which she slung a strap over her shoulder and picked up the book, but set it back down upon the table. The female was confident that she had covered every topic in the book with a degree of accuracy and deduced that for her purposes, what that book covered, was absolutely pointless. While the female did learn some new ciphers, it only helped her to progress slightly, a tiny step in the mountain of research that she was yet to climb. One that she hoped was far more progressive, at least one could only dream that it would be. Raven leaned over the desk to blow out the candle that was dangerously low already and proceeded to head out, back to the family home.

Here is my little secret for you-

[Oberan]

Review Rewards

The Coolest Teen Titan

Points awarded: 10

Knowledge:

Cryptography: Substitution Ciphers
Cryptography: Monoalphabetic Cipher
Cryptography: Polyalphabetic Substitution Cipher
Cryptography: Transposition Cipher
Cryptography: Columnar Cipher
Research: Analysis

Magic: No magic exp

Other: N/A

Notes:
Classical Keys indeed. Entertaining enough for a grind-ish thread, and I especially liked the glimpses of Raven's personality and motivations woven in that gave the thread that much more oomph.

Your review request is here.
Please include the following stamp to your review request:

Code: Select all

[center][img]/gallery/image/15001/medium[/img][/center]

If you have any questions, comments or concerns in regards to this review, feel free to PM.