JBO Zeta Cipher
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Project Status: Release date: 26.03.2005 See the bigger picture. |
The purpose of the Zeta Cipher is to secure text and messages using a modern implementation of neo-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 alphanumeric key (any sequence of permitted characters and of any length) to perform polyalphabetic substitution against a random table of cipher characters, and a numeric key which allows the user to select any of one thousand variants of the cipher table, along with irregular columnar transposition based on a key which is automatically calculated by the programme, and you have the basis of the Zeta Cipher.
The programme provides tabbed pages into which plaintext, or ciphertext, may be typed or loaded from suitable text files. Once the keys have been entered, the user may encrypt or decrypt the desired text.
With one kilobyte of text, frequency is generally below 5% for all characters, and the user may select keys to obtain frequencies much lower than that.
It is possible to use randomly generated keys equal in length to the plaintext, thus enabling Zeta 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.
When decrypting a piece of ciphertext, even though the keys are not encrypted into the text, the Zeta programme is aware of whether the result is the correct plaintext or not. If the incorrect keys are used, or if the ciphertext is not an example of Zeta encryption, then output to the plain text page will be the message "Incorrect keys or source data".
For programme specific help, visit the Zeta help page.
Zeta is our flagship cipher programme, and while Zeta encryption does increase data size, it is a minor cost in relation to the security gained. Zeta features an expanded frequency analysis facility (in comparison with similar features in some of our other cipher packages) which will not only confirm the random appearance of the frequency distribution, but may also assist in the choice of key combinations when encrypting difficult data (e.g. data which is very repetitious).
