Hand Coding Procedures |
| Hand coding is the process of encoding or translating information. This simple document and accompanying table is intended as an introduction to the process. |
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| While the Hand Coding Table provided looks intimidating at first, you will soon find that the table is quite easy to use. The table is a 94 x 94 matrix with each row representing a unique combination of the basic caracters that you can type at the computer keyboard. |
| What I am going to show you is an evolved form of a very old method of encryption. This method is known as a lookup list method of translation. This method existed before computers were used as the primary tool for encrytion and is easier for humans to do than complex math. |
| This method of coding or translation will require that you have the Hand Coding Table with you when you encode or decode. You should find that it will print out nicely on 2 pages. I recommend you try printing it before continuing with this explanation. |
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Now that you have your printed table in front of you let's continue with our explanation
of how you can use it for coding (encrypting) your information. The traditional lookup list
method of translation involved mapping the position of characters in the alphabet over top
of a scrambled listing as follows: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz wkxrthbsqvuyzncjfmdgaoilep |
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Looking up the letters in one line and then writing the letter from the same location in
the other line provided a way of translating the text from sensible to nonsensical and back.
For example the word "hello" would translate to "stxxc". Then you could translate back by using the lines in reverse order. |
| If you have kept up so far you can see that the whole security of the translation depends on the secrecy of the scrambled line. This is because the mechanism of using the translation is plain and there is really no missing information providing that you have the scrambled line. This is where encryption has really evolved. In today's encryption the mechanism is more complex and usually requires some missing information to work. The missing information is usually called the "Key". |
| Breaking or cracking (as it is often called) the encryption in the simple lookup list shown above is often accomplished by simply trying out scrambled lines until all of the original text can be revealed. Breaking in this fashion would be called a "brute force" effort since it would require trying every possibility rather than capitalizing on some intrinsic weakness that would reveal the Key. How many possible scrambled lines do you suppose there would be before you would hit on the right one? |
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Our system works by first looking up the characters of a password in one of the 94 rows.
Lets assume for our purposes that we use the first row. Mark down or otherwise remember
the column number of each character in the password. These numbers represent the rows
that we will use for translating the text we want to encode. Lets say our password is hello That means our numbers will be: 28,12,36,36,42 |
| We are now going to look up each of our data characters as we cycle through the rows indicated by our password. So to translate our first character of our data we look up the first character in the first row and determine it's column number. Then we go to the row indicated by the first character of our password and record the character we find at that column. We move on to the second character of our data and use the row indicated by the second caracter of our password to get the translated character. We continue this until we reach then end of our password. Then we go back to the row indicated by our first password character. This process is encoding our data. |
| To reverse the process and get our origional data back we simply look the encrypted data character up in the row indicated by the password and determine it's column number. Then we look up the character at that column in the first row. |
| You will notice that a space is a character too and as such it is included in the rows of the table. Translating the space character serves to help break up word patterns that would help someone crack your encryption. I should mention as well that the number 1 is hard to distinguish from the lowercase letter l in the table. The way I tell them appart is the number 1 has a bigger top peice. The strength of your encryption is dependant on the size and complexity of the password (as it is with any encryption). So I recommend that you use passwords that are larger than 5 characters and that include a variety of case, numbers and punctuation characters. |
| Practise with this mechanism for a while. Then try changing the process. Use a different row to look up your password. Or use a password to determine rows to look up yet another passwords column numbers. As you can see there is great variety for your mechanism. In this case both your password(s) and mechanism (procedure) can be secret without having to record them. Only your table could be discovered. This table would present a much greater challenge to a would be cracker. |
| I hope you enjoyed this introduction to Hand Coding. You may find it very useful to learn. |