VIC cipher - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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VIC cipher

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The VIC cipher was a pencil and paper cipher used by the Soviet
spy Reino
Hayhanen, codenamed "VICTOR".
It was arguably the most complex hand-operated cipher ever seen. Although
certainly not as complex or secure as modern computer operated stream
ciphers or block ciphers, in practice
messages protected by it resisted all attempts at cryptanalysis by at least
NSA (and perhaps other
organizations such as GCHQ) from its discovery in 1953 until Hayhanen's defection in 1957.
The VIC cipher can be regarded as the evolutionary pinnacle of the Nihilist cipher family.
It has several components, including mod 10 chain addition
(a lagged Fibonacci
generator, a recursive formula used to generate a sequence of pseudorandom digits), a straddling
checkerboard, and a disrupted double
transposition. Until the discovery of VIC, it was generally thought that a
double transposition alone was the most complex cipher an agent, as a practical
matter, could use as a field cipher.

[edit]
References

David Kahn, Number One From Moscow

[edit]
External links

John
Savard's page on the VIC cipher
PPC-XX,
a variant with four different keying methodes
SECOM, a
VIC variant with extended checkerboard

[edit]
See also

Topics in
cryptography.




Classical cryptography

v â€Ã³ d â€Ã³ e

Ciphers: ADFGVX | Affine | Alberti | Atbash | Autokey | Bifid | Book | Caesar | Four-square |
Hill | Keyword | Nihilist | Permutation |
Pigpen | Playfair | Polyalphabetic
| Polybius | Rail Fence | Reihenschieber | Reservehandverfahren
| ROT13 | Running key |
Scytale |
Smithy code | Solitaire | Straddling
checkerboard | Substitution |
Tap
Code | Transposition
| Trifid | Two-square |
VIC cipher | Vigenère

Cryptanalysis: Frequency analysis
| Index of coincidence

Misc: Cryptogram | Bacon | Polybius square
| Scytale
| Straddling checkerboard
| Tabula recta


Cryptography
v â€Ã³ d â€Ã³ e

History of
cryptography | Cryptanalysis | Cryptography
portal | Topics in
cryptography

Symmetric-key
algorithm | Block cipher | Stream cipher | Public-key
cryptography | Cryptographic hash function
| Message authentication code
| Random numbers
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC_cipher"

Category: Classical
ciphers



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This page was last modified 13:11, 2 January 2007.
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