JBO Xia Cipher Help

Xia Cipher is designed to encrypt and decrypt text mesages using a unique combination of classical methods of encryption.

Overview:

Xia Cipher automatically removes non-alphabetic characters from the text before encryption, decryption, or analysis (if a ciphertext contains non-alphabetic characters then it is probably not a Xia ciphertext). The stripped text is subjected to polyalphabetic substitution against multiple tables of randomly generated characters as determined by the user-entered Key Word, with interleaved irregular columnar transposition as determined by the user-entered Key Number.

Ciphertext which has been encrypted by Xia yields Frequency Analysis and Sequence Analysis results which are very similar to those for randomly generated text. With one kilobyte of text, frequency is generally below 5% for all characters, while for five kilobytes, this falls to between 3,5% and 4,5% (subject to key words which are not overly repetitious).

Operation:

The Open, Save, Print, and Clear toolbar buttons perform those actions for the selected editor page; Save will also save the Analysis graph.
You must set both Keys before encryption or decryption is possible. A minimum of five alphabetic characters of data is required.
You must encrypt text, or load some cipher text, in order to perform analysis.
The Analysis button calculates the frequency distribution of the ciphertext and displays the result graphically on the Analysis page.
Click Save to save the graph image in bitmap (.bmp) format. The Analysis page auto closes when another page is selected.
The Group ciphertext button will format the text into five letter groups if clicked when the Cipher Text page is displayed.
The Help page is accessible from the help menu or by pressing F1. This page auto closes when another page is selected.

Encryption:

Select the Plain Text tab to display the plaintext editor. You may load a text file into the plaintext editor, or type the message you wish to encrypt. Set the alphabetic and numeric keys. Click the Encrypt button. The ciphertext is now in the Cipher Text editor.

Decryption:

Select the Cipher Text tab to display the ciphertext editor. You may load a text file into the ciphertext editor, or type the message you wish to decrypt. Set the alphabetic and numeric keys. Click the Decrypt button. The plaintext is now in the Plain Text editor.

Analysis:

You may analyse the frequency distribution of cipher text by clicking on the Analyse button. If there is sufficient text in the Cipher Text editor, the results of the analysis will appear in bar graph format on the Analysis page.