Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!beta!mbr
From: mbr@beta.UUCP (Mike Rose)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Re: Denning Cipher?
Message-ID: <16397@beta.UUCP>
Date: 11 Mar 88 16:30:02 GMT
References: <2109@polya.STANFORD.EDU> <316@markle.randvax.UUCP> <2126@polya.STANFORD.EDU>
Reply-To: mbr@beta.UUCP (Mike Rose)
Organization: Los Alamos Natl. Lab, Los Alamos, NM
Lines: 28

In article <2126@polya.STANFORD.EDU> haddad@polya.UUCP (Ramsey Haddad) writes:
>Mike Rose (mbr@lanl.gov) told me that he had seen the solution before,
>that the code was based of the Declaration of Independance, and that
>he believed that the answer was: DO NOT BREAM THIS.  

Well, actually I didn't see it anywhere, so it's just my guess.


>tentatively accepted his answer, and assumed that the `M' was either
>because (1) Denning could find no `K' in the nearby text, or (2) the
>Beale ciphers had encoding errors, and so she inserted an intentional
>one as an inside joke.

(1) is possible, as there are no words beginning with "K" in Denning's DOI.
But I also suspect some variant of (2); it's the old problem of
"how do you know when you've broken the cipher".


>I didn't check the Declaration of Independance myself, because I hoped
>that someone would have an on-line version that would save some
>tedious counting and reduce the possibility of errors.

Denning has a DOI fragment in her book.  It even has the words numbered.
For numbers past the end, wrap back to the beginning.


Mike Rose
mbr@lanl.gov