The Naibbe cipher

[oshfdk]

IMHO, the process isn't that much more complicated compared to other ciphers available in the first half of the 1400s, but I agree that adding nulls and specific rules just to prove a point (e.g. the top line 'gallows' appears because of this specific type of encoding) would not be useful.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but to me the process looks much more complicated than, say, the diplomatic ciphers from Tranchedino's list. There we have one table of mappings that occupies half a page, and then a small dictionary of special mappings for common or sensitive terms. The process of encoding is extremely simple, just replace a character with a ciphertext glyph of your choice, add a null now and then, special glyphs can be used for common or potentially incriminating words (the King, the Pope, the Church, etc).

For Naibbe there is a multistage process with a random source and six tables of three mappings for each character. Achieving essentially the same result - one to many substitution. Why add complexity with no obvious advantage? Encoding 240 pages is not a simple task using any cipher.

What I find most interesting about this whole paper is the division of the plaintext into bigrams and unigrams, as well as the use of six different tables of glyphs. This makes total statistical sense and explains many of the properties of vords distribution.

This is exactly the problem I'm referring to, I'm not sure looking for things that make statistical sense makes practical sense   To me it's the other way around, there should be things that make practical sense leading to things that make statistical sense.