JBO Xia Cipher
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Project Status: Release date: 21.03.2005 See the bigger picture. |
The purpose of the Xia Cipher is to secure text and messages using classical cryptographic methods. What all ciphers (except a One Time Pad) have in common is that ultimately, they are breakable. The issue is the amount of time it would take to break them and whether such time would be well spent. Some modern methods of encryption rely on large numbers which (so far) cannot be factored for security. Most traditional ciphers have a finite number of solutions ... consider a cipher system which uses an alphabetic key (any sequence of letters and of any length) to perform polyalphabetic substitution against multiple tables of randomly generated cipher characters, and a numeric key to perform irregular columnar transposition interleaved with the substitution, and you have the basis of the Xia Cipher.
The programme provides tabbed pages into which plaintext, or ciphertext, may be typed or loaded from suitable text files. Once a key has been entered, the user may encrypt or decrypt the desired text. When text is present on the ciphertext page, it is possible to generate a bar graph showing the frequency analysis of the ciphertext.
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). It is possible to use randomly generated keys equal in length to the plaintext, thus enabling Xia to operate as a One Time Pad cipher. Even with shorter and more user-friendly keys, patterns in ciphertext are not helpful to anyone attempting to analyse the cipher.
For programme specific help, visit the Xia help page.
