The VIC cipher is an intricate cipher issued by the Soviet Union to at least one of its spies. It is of interest because it seems highly secure, despite being a pencil-and-paper cipher. It was the cipher in which a message was written which was found on a piece of microfilm inside a hollowed-out nickel by a newspaper boy in 1953. The workings of this cipher were explained by Hayhaynen to FBI agents shortly after his defection to the United States in 1957.
David Kahn described that cipher briefly in an article in Scientific American, and in full detail in a talk at the 1960 annual convention of the American Cryptogram Association which was later reprinted in his book Kahn on Codes.
The VIC cipher, which I will demonstrate here adapted to the sending of English-language messages, begins with an involved procedure to produce ten pseudorandom digits. The agent must have memorized six digits (which were in the form of a date), and the first 20 letters of a key phrase (which was the beginning of a popular song) and must think of five random digits for use as a message indicator.
Let the date be July 4, 1776, to give the digits 741776. (Actually, the Russians used their customary form of dates, with the month second.) And let the random indicator group be 77651.
The first step is to perform digit by digit subtraction (without carries) of the first five digits of the date from the indicator group:
77651
(-) 74177
---------
03584
The second step is to take the 20-letter keyphrase, and turn it into 20 digits by dividing it into two halves, and within each half, assigning 1 to the letter earliest in the alphabet, and so on, treating 0 as the last number, and assigning digits in order to identical letters. Thus, if our keyphrase is "I dream of Jeannie with t", that step proceeds:
I D R E A M O F J E A N N I E W I T H T 6 2 0 3 1 8 9 5 7 4 1 6 7 4 2 0 5 8 3 9
The result of the first step is then expanded to ten digits through a process called chain addition. This is a decimal analog of the way a linear-feedback shift register works: starting with a group of a certain number of digits (in this case five, and later we will do the same thing with a group of ten digits), add the first two digits in the group together, take only the last digit of the result and append it to the end of the group, then ignore the first digit, and repeat the process.
The 10 digit result is then added, digit by digit, ignoring carries, to the first 10 digits produced from the keyphrase to produce a ten-digit result, as follows:
6 2 0 3 1 8 9 5 7 4
(+) 0 3 5 8 4 3 8 3 2 7
-----------------------
6 5 5 1 5 1 7 8 9 1
And these 10 digits are then encoded by encoding 1 as the first of the 10 digits produced from the second half of the keyphrase, 2 as the second, up to 0 as the tenth.
using code: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
1 6 7 4 2 0 5 8 3 9
6 5 5 1 5 1 7 8 9 1
becomes 0 2 2 1 2 1 5 8 3 1
This ten digit number is used by chain addition to generate 50 pseudorandom digits for use in encipherment:
0 2 2 1 2 1 5 8 3 1 --------------------- 2 4 3 3 3 6 3 1 4 3 6 7 6 6 9 9 4 5 7 9 3 3 2 5 8 3 9 2 6 2 6 5 7 3 1 2 1 8 8 8 1 2 0 4 3 3 9 6 6 9
The last row of these digits (which will still be used again) is used like the letters in a keyword for transposition to produce a permutation of the digits 1 through 9 (with 0 last again):
1 2 0 4 3 3 9 6 6 9 --------------------- 1 2 0 5 3 4 8 6 7 9
and those digits are used as the top row of numbers for a straddling checkerboard:
1 2 0 5 3 4 8 6 7 9 ------------------- A T O N E S I R ------------------- 0 B C D F G H J K L M 8 P Q U V W X Y Z . /
One detail omitted is that the checkerboard actually used had the letters in the bottom part written in vertical columns with some columns left until the end. That doesn't work as well in an English example, as there are only two left-over spaces after the alphabet.
With the straddling checkerboard in place, we can begin enciphering a message.
Let our message be:
We are pleased to hear of your success in establishing your false identity. You will be sent some money to cover expenses within a month.
Converting this to numbers, we proceed:
W EAREP L EASED TOH EAROF Y OU RSU C C ESSINESTAB L ISH ING 834194810741640025044195058858096800202466734621010776047303 Y OU RF AL SEID ENTITY Y OU W IL L B ESENTSOM EM ONEY TOC O 88580905107647004327288885808370707014643265094095348825025 V EREX P ENSESW ITH INAM ONTH 854948481436468372047310953204
For the sake of our example, we will give our agent a small personal number of 8. This number is used to work out the widths of the two transposition tableaux used to transpose the numbers obtained above. The last two unequal digits, which in this case are the last two digits (6 and 9) of the last row of the 50 numbers generated above, are added to the personal number with the result that the two transpositions will involve 8+6, or 14, and 8+9, or 17, columns respectively.
The keys for those two transpositions are taken by reading out the 50 numbers by columns, using the 10 digits used to generate them as a transposition key. Again, 0 is last, so given the table above:
0 2 2 1 2 1 5 8 3 1 --------------------- 2 4 3 3 3 6 3 1 4 3 6 7 6 6 9 9 4 5 7 9 3 3 2 5 8 3 9 2 6 2 6 5 7 3 1 2 1 8 8 8 1 2 0 4 3 3 9 6 6 9
we read out the digits in order:
36534 69323 39289 47352 36270 39813 4
stopping when we have the 31 digits we need.
Our first transposition uses the first 14 digits as the key of a conventional simple columnar transposition:
36534693233928 -------------- 83419481074164 00250441950588 58096800202466 73462101077604 73038858090510 76470043272888 85808370707014 64326509409534 88250258549484 81436468372047 3109532049
Since our message consisted of ten rows of 14 digits, plus one extra row of 9 digits, it is 149 digits long. At this initial stage, one null digit is appended to the message, making it 150 digits long, so that it will fill a whole number of 5-digit groups.
Thus, with the null digit added, it gives us the intermediate form of the message:
09200274534 6860181384 80577786883 15963702539 11018309880 75079700479 4027027992 90628086065 42040483240 30833654811 44818035243 4864084447 84005470562 1546580540
The fact that our message is 150 digits long was important to note, since the next step in the encipherment, although it is also a columnar transposition, includes an extra complexity to make the transposition irregular, and so it is necessary to lay out in advance the space that will be used in that transposition.
The remaining 17 digits of the 31 we read out above, 9 47352 36270 39813 4, are the key for this second transposition. The numbers, in addition to indicating the order in which the columns are to be read out, indicate where triangular areas start which will be filled in last.
The first triangular area starts at the top of the column which will be read out first, and extends to the end of the first row. It continues in the next row, starting one column later, and so on until it includes only the digit in the last column. Then, after one space, the second triangular area starts, this time in the column which will be read out second.
Since we know that our message is 150 digits long, we know that it will fill 8 rows of 17 digits, with 14 digits in the final row. This lets us fill in the transposition block, first avoiding the triangular areas:
94735236270398134 ----------------- 09200274534686 018138480577786 8831596370253911 01830988075079700 47940 270279 9290628 08606542 040483240
and then with them filled in as well:
94735236270398134 ----------------- 09200274534686308 01813848057778633 88315963702539116 01830988075079700 47940548114481803 27027952434864084 92906284478400547 08606542056215465 04048324080540
from which the fully encrypted message can be read out:
36178054 289959253 507014400 011342004 746845842 675048425 03100846 918177284 83603475 035007668 483882424 283890960 350713758 689914050 008042900 873786014 472544860
The last digit, 6, in the date shows that the indicator group is to be inserted in the final message as the sixth group from the end, so the message in the form in which it will be transmitted becomes:
36178 05428 99592 53507 01440 00113 42004 74684 58426 75048 42503 10084 69181 77284 83603 47503 50076 68483 88242 42838 90960 35071 37586 89914 05000 77651 80429 00873 78601 44725 44860
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