AdaCrypt - Vector Cryptography

A Modernised ASCII-Modulated One-Time Pad

This cryptography uses the concept of equal, synchronized databases that are set up once at the outset of a secure communications loop being formed. The instigator of a loop is a person called Alice, a pseudonym according to the industry standard names for the sending entity of a communications loop. The receiving person is called Bob. This system obviates the need for secure transmission of the key that used to be a damning feature of the original historic one-time pad cryptosystem.

With that out of the way, the focus is now shifted to acquiring randomness in the encryption key pads and replacing each keypad at the end of a message with a new random keypad that will be used in the next message. Coupled with this is the need to make the keys large enough to accommodate a fairly reasonably sized message in one ‘go’. A message length of 14000 characters is taken here as a typical message. Messages greater than this in length can be made up of blocks of 14000 characters that are each encrypted using a fresh keypad for each one.

A basic key pad selection domain is formed by combining modules of the 95 writable characters of ASCII. One keypad only is taken from this very large set and is contained in a package that is ‘off page’ normally to the computer. At ‘booting up’ time, preparatory to an encryption session, the computer loads up this keypad, shuffles it according to certain scrambling parameters and places it ‘within sight’ of the main program in an array for easy calling by the main program later on.

This cryptosystem uses the ASCII set of alphanumeric characters as the Vigenere square that is at the heart of the one-time pad cipher. The upshot of doing this is that the resulting cipher text is alphanumeric in nature and cannot be ‘brute forced’ by either lexical methods or mathematical methods.

The cipher is programmed in Ada-95, it is up and running in Windows XP, it has an encryption rate under test of 10852 characters in less than one second on an older home computer. The decryption time was 2 seconds for the same number of characters of cipher text.

This is a very elegant, profoundly stable cryptosystem and it is clearly theoretically unbreakable to boot. It is totally computer intensive.

Introduction

The writer has been preoccupied for some time with the idea of developing a modernized version of the famous one-time pad cipher. This cipher was invented by Major Joseph Mauborgne who was head of cryptographic research for the US army circa 1920.

All of the books on cryptography introduce the one-time pad cipher as the intellectual paradox of the last century. The one and only cipher in existence that is unbreakable but is also impractical and therefore unworkable. After some more peripheral small talk they usually leave the subject with a kind of fatalism that says it will never be a viable reality for the future. When accounts are being verbalized the speakers often can hardly contain themselves from indulging into triumphal élan at the catch 22 situation, if there is a secure way of delivering the key then there is a secure way of delivering the cipher text and there is now no need for the key. The bad joke of Alice pitching up on Bob’s doorstep with the key in one pocket and the cipher text in another seems to be irresistible to not being told without laughter.

It is worth noting however that up to quite recently the US government communicated with Moscow by means of a one-time pad. The key was carried by trusted courier.

Major Mauborgne’s invention had a slightly mad flair to it in the way he tore up pads and used them as keys but what Joseph Mauborgne had in mind was something quite unfamiliar to many people and still is misunderstood today – that is randomness, a subtle un-mathematical property that defies any reversal experiments by an adversary into how a string of cipher text data was given structure initially, the knowing of which can change it back into information. It was Major Mauborgne who first realized the value of randomness as a cryptography tool and sought ways of applying it.

The Sumerians invented mathematics so as to get control of their lives from randomness. The inference is clear, even today, randomness is the antithesis of mathematics. Trying to achieve randomness by mathematical means as most modern ciphers are trying to do is most unlikely to succeed.

The arrival of ASCII in the middle of the last century was a watershed in the history of cryptography. As a result of giving data what is essentially a primary transformation from alphabetic form into numeric form, number theoretic cryptography became the self suggesting way forward. Given the huge established methodology of numbers this may seem a natural thing to do on the basis that everything else in life is modeled by numbers.

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