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Concept
Poem code
Summary
The poem code is a simple, and insecure, cryptographic method which was used during World War II by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) to communicate with their agents in Nazi-occupied Europe.
The method works by the sender and receiver pre-arranging a poem to use. The sender chooses a set number of words at random from the poem and gives each letter in the chosen words a number. The numbers are then used as a key for a transposition cipher to conceal the plaintext of the message. The cipher used was often double transposition. To indicate to the receiver which words had been chosen, an indicator group of letters is sent at the start of the message.
To encrypt a message, the agent would select words from the poem as the key. Every poem code message commenced with an indicator group of five letters, whose position in the alphabet indicated which five words of an agent's poem would be used to encrypt the message. For instance, suppose the poem is the first stanza of Jabberwocky:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
We could select the five words THE WABE TOVES TWAS MOME, which are at positions 4, 13, 6, 1, and 21 in the poem, and describe them with the corresponding indicator group DMFAU.
The five words are written sequentially, and their letters numbered to create a transposition key to encrypt a message. Numbering proceeds by first numbering the A's in the five words starting with 1, then continuing with the B's, then the C's, and so on; any absent letters are simply skipped. In our example of THE WABE TOVES TWAS MOME, the two A's are numbered 1, 2; the B is numbered 3; there are no C's or D's; the four E's are numbered 4, 5, 6, 7; there are no G's; the H is numbered 8; and so on through the alphabet. This results in a transposition key of 15 8 4, 19 1 3 5, 16 11 18 6 13, 17 20 2 14, 9 12 10 7.
This defines a permutation which is used for encryption. First, the plaintext message is written in the rows of a grid that has as many columns as the transposition key is long.
Official source
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