The Naibbe cipher

[davidma]

This is very interesting. I find the cipher a bit complex (sort of dice and card game, and I don't see it very easy to cipher and not even very easy to decipher, but this is the trick! If it is cyphered, only the allowed people should be able to read it...).

To my understanding though the Naibbe cipher uses cards and dice only to give a plausible explanation to the frequency of substitution tables and the spacing using something that people in the 1400-1450s had readily on hand. As long as the frequency behaviour is replicated it could be anything, any sort of randomizer works as long as the probabilities of picking a given encryption table are respected. It could even be scribal preference, though there have been compelling arguments that the scribes didnt really know what they were writing so maybe not. For me the "worrying" part is not so much the complexity (the cipher in itself is not particularly complex and if you have the tables on hand it can be decrypted quite quickly) but that without the original tables we might not be able to decrypt the VM (if it is encrypted at all), or extremely complex.

I do not recall seeing anything that came close to the VM on all statistical indicators (bar the line and paragraph phenomena) apart from the Naibbe cipher, which means that this surely is on the track to something. As i recall from your post quimqu no other cipher had that distinctive bump that the VM has, but the naibbe one does. The other worry I have is the lables, I can't see how they would fit in the naibbe cipher at all because being verbose implies they at most encrypt 4 or 5 characters which would not carry much meaning (unless everything in the VM is heavily abbreviated, which is possible)