A Crypto Miracle…and a Literary Marvel!

Encryption is a cornerstone in every regulated industry…from IPSec to HAIPE.  Encryption holds the key to power, wealth and the government’s deepest darkest secrets!  Encryption has advanced significantly passed the ‘old-school’ strategy of letter substitution but let’s wind the clock back for a second and pay homage to an amazing feat – even to today’s standard!  The first rule of cracking older encryption algorithms is letter frequency analysis.  If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s the thought process that the cleartext message using plain English verbiage will hold true that certain letters of the alphabet are used more frequently than others.  For instance, the letter ‘e’ is the most frequently used character and accounts for 12.7% of all letters used according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency.

Take a minute (or five for that matter) and try and construct a substantial sentence without using the letter ‘e’.  Difficult huh?!  In 1939, Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel named “Gadsby“.  The novel, also known as a lipogram meaning a constrained writing, is more than 50,100 words extending more than 267 pages!  The task is even more impressive considering it was written in the past tense but avoiding the verb ending ‘-ed’.  Having just published a book myself, this feat not only amazes my cryptographic draw (a topic I studied extensively in graduate school to the point of performing 6 binary MD5 iterations BY HAND for a final exam) but is a literary phenomenon.   An e-version of Gadsby can be found at https://www.spinelessbooks.com/gadsby/01.html.

This blog entry contains 161 uses of the letter ‘e’ – a 11.2% letter frequency.