The Naibbe cipher

[magnesium]

Hello @magnesium, I found the presentation really interesting and started reading the paper as soon as the meeting ended. Honestly, this is one of the best theories I've ever read about a possible encryption for natural language plaintext. As far as I know, nobody has ever been able to replicate so many properties (entropy, clustering, average length of words, positioning, differences in suffixes and prefixes, etc.) of the VMS together like this.

There are still some problems, such as the labels, and the fact that the predominance of rare glyphs in the top line is not at all explained by the Naibbe cipher. Could those lines/parts of the VMS text have been encrypted using a completely different type of cypher that still uses the same encoded glyphs? Who knows  

Fact is, I think you're surely onto something with the bigram/unigram plaintext thing..

Thanks so much! I really appreciate it. And I agree: there are still problems! The next phase of work is to do more fine-tuning and attempt to replicate more line-, paragraph-, and page-level properties. 

For example, the current version of the Naibbe cipher contains no nulls, and while the construction of the cipher is meant to replicate the frequency and pair frequency of a rare glyph like p, it doesn't endow p with any special properties. But these are conditions we could, of course, change. I didn't optimize the tables for this, but one could imagine a world in which only 1 of the 6 Naibbe tables features bigram prefixes and suffixes that contain p, and for whatever reason, the cipher's ruleset dictates that that particular table is the one that's used to encrypt the opening lines of paragraphs. As I mentioned elsewhere, one could also imagine treating the paragraph-opener gallows glyph (e.g., p) or prefix (e.g., pch) as a null, simply meant to denote the start of a paragraph.