Talk:Cipher disk

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Eric-The changes that you made to the page on Cipher Disks are good. I like that you added information on when the cipher disk was developed and how it works. This is important information for the page to have. As I was looking at the page, I noticed a mistake in one of the sentences that was already on the page before you edited it. The sentence is in the paragraph about polyalphabetic ciphers, and says, “An easy way to do this is for the sender and the recipient to agree that a certain number of characters into the message…” I believe that the word “for” should be added before “a” and "into" should be "in" so that the sentence reads “An easy way to do this is for the sender and the recipient to agree that for a certain number of characters in the message…" I also looked at the changes Hazel made to the page, which are good and certainly useful to have. However, I think that it seems as though two very different people edited the page, and while this is not a bad thing, you two might want to try to add information using the same tone or writing style. ~Sam~ 123samantha (talk) 21:03, 13 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

While the information on this topic has been expanded considerably, the 'voice' of the article changes noticably. I would suggest making the Civil War stuff a bit less conversational, though I can totally picture Hazel saying this in class... Anyway, you could also benefit from some more headers, because right now the page just looks disproportionate. The top part could be broken up into a section like "Development of Cipher Disks" after a short introductory piece. This will then also move up the table of contents, which right now looks a bit strange at the middle of the article. Happy Wiki-ing! BLaB1236 (talk) 02:24, 14 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Cipher diskes must have something to do with Treasure's Trove 2, the secret of the alchemist darChris0987654321 17:05, 7 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The good old days

They weren't as good as you might think. This is because mechanical cipher discs only ever allow shifted cipher alphabets: while the plaintext alphabet always appears in order from A to Z, the ciphertext alphabet (on the inner or outer ring) is often heavily permutated. However, the cyclical order always remains the same when the two are moved against each other. If you know one of the cipher alphabets, you automatically know all the alphabets that can be cyclically shifted to it!

Today, there are computers that can be used to perfectly simulate such discs, from Vigenère and Alberti to Diana cipher and the homoalphabetic Mexican Field Cipher Disk with four (!) concentric inner rings for the homophones ØØ to 99. The Frenchman Nicolas Berne offers two excellent apps in this regard for free download in the various app stores. ("Caesar Cipher Disk" and "Mexican Army Cipher Disk". In the first app, there are numerous different cipher discs to choose from, and you can even create your own cipher discs to suit your own style. A third app created bye Berne, "Caesar" ist even able to decipher a polyalphabetic Vigenère-Cipher in the most frequent languages).

What I am still missing (and this is easily possible today) is a cipher disc in which the sequence of characters on the ring with the cipher characters changes completely with each rotation step. This would finally make it possible to use an extremely permutated "Latin Square" for polyalphabetic encryption, in which the rows or columns are not simply shifted against each other as in the tabula recta (possibly 10^320 exists for 26 Letters !). Then you wouldn't have to dig out a large key table every time. (And of course you can also provide 28 plain text characters (A - Z, ., /), for which a total of 28 "straddling checkerboards" are then available, whereby the eight individual digits are always assigned to the most common letters of the English language (E,T,A,O,I,N,S,R) !)

It would certainly be more secure than conventional polyalphabetic Vigenère encryption, even if the keyword length could of course be determined as quickly as with Vigenère: however, decryption would be nowhere near as easy as when using Trithemius' tabula recta for the Vigenère method. Permissiveactionlink (talk) 12:12, 30 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]