And they say the universe doesn't have a sense of irony...
Anybody who's only seen the fictional film representation may find it surprising.
This one was apparently made more difficult by the fact that every other symbol was random. (And apparently using some symbols that did not otherwise appear in the code.)
Though two triangles are used per letter - you can check that with one of the examples which has a message "Why does my nose hurt after concerts?" - 37 characters in total (including spaces), then count the triangles - 74. Hence two inside triangles are used per character.
But certainly highlights how adding noise to any encryption has it's upsides.
That's assuming that the secret is the encryption algorithm itself rather than the key. Modern symmetric encryption does not work that way - the algorithm is public and well known while the key is the actual secret required for encryption/decryption.
I don't see how adding noise in modern encryption can help other than increase the size of the output.
Some modes of operation make use of random noise (IV in CBC, nonce in CTR, etc) because it's a convenient way to get a unique number but it's not for obscurity, it's because it's needed to prevent attacks on these modes.
> But it was impossible to crack them […]
Confirmed uncrackable. He looked at it Jim, what else was he supposed to do??
"GCHQ told Sullivan that Sidebottom "had a small but dedicated following" among its staff."
Couple of people do Sidebottom dialogues as an in-joke to the extent that it begins to annoy co-workers.
"[After random outer triangles explained] 'Right, we've cracked it during a light-hearted training exercise.'"
Took a couple of minutes as a starter in a session.
PS: I use a Playfair style grid to jumble up my pass phrases to try to make them less susceptible to rainbow table attack. Am I wasting my time?
You know you are, you really are.
Is it really that hard to fool some of the worlds top code breakers, simply by including some random digits?
So a code where every {x} symbol is random, and suddenly you've got an uncrackable code? Surely it cant be that simple?
tlhpebcokqodengisxf
And keep in mind that is the code before it's enciphered. Even better, the random characters could be not entirely random but rather weighted to try to bring most characters in the message to a roughly similar frequency. So far as I know the primary tool of code cracking is just plain old frequency analysis. Curious if anybody has any proposals on how this would even be possible to crack.
