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Kappa and Chi

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Decrypted Secrets

Abstract

Astonishingly, given a monoalphabetically encrypted cryptotext, it is easier to say whether it is in English, French, or German, than to decrypt it. This is also true for plaintext: there is a reliable method to test a sufficiently long text for its membership of a known language, without ‘taking notice’ of it— without regarding its grammar and semantics—and there is a related test to decide whether two texts belong to the same language, without closely inspecting them.

Riverbank Publication No. 22, written in 1920 when Friedman was 28, must be regarded as the most important single publication in cryptology.

David Kahn 1967

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Literatur

  1. Alfréd Rényi (1921–1970), Hungarian mathematician.

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  2. Claude E. Shannon (b. 1916), American mathematician, engineer, and information theorist, first became famous in 1937 with a publication on relay circuits and Boolean algebra (A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits. Trans. AIEE 57, 713–723, 1938). In 1941, at Bell Laboratories, he worked on mathematical problems in the communication of noisy and secret messages. This led him into information theory (A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Bell System Technical Journal, July 1948, p. 379, Oct. 1948, p. 623 and, together with Warren Weaver, Mathematical Theory of Communication. Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana 1949).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Munich Institute of Technology, Arcisstrasse 21, 80333, Munich, Germany

    Dr. rer. nat. Dr. ès sc. h.c. Dr. rer. nat. h.c. mult. Friedrich L. Bauer (Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Computer Science)

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  1. Dr. rer. nat. Dr. ès sc. h.c. Dr. rer. nat. h.c. mult. Friedrich L. Bauer
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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Bauer, F.L. (2000). Kappa and Chi. In: Decrypted Secrets. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04024-9_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04024-9_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-04026-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-04024-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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