Part of the
World War II Cryptographic Simulation
Our primary system uses what are called '
One-Time Pads'. These pads are covered with
random numbers which are then used in sequence to
encipher each letter of the message. This means that the
only way to decipher a message is to have the same
one-time pad that was used to
encipher it. Unlike the
rotor machines used by
virtually every other country in this war, there is no pattern behind these
sheets;
one-time pads are completely
random. Thus, there is no way to 'crack' them.
A typical one-time pad looks something like this:
053 786 423 156 023 786 985 746 121 159 678 423 086
945 621 478 215 046 478 954 761 554 448 897 810 065
544 555 648 729 354 687 912 405 005 761 917 734 610
and so on. Each number is then used as the
base for an
alphabet. For example, the word THAT could be enciphered like this:
THAT written as numbers is 20 7 1 20.
I then look at the first 4 numbers on my pad, and add them to my message.
053 + 20 = 73
786 + 7 = 793
423 + 1 = 424
156 + 20 = 176
To complicate things we sometimes use
non-carrying addition. We also might place a different letter as the
base of the alphabet. So, instead of 053 equaling the first letter, A, it might equal J. Thus, if A was enciphered we would take away 10 to compensate for the J. We use
Cyrillic, of course, but this example in your Latin script is probably easier to understand. Because each alphabet is completely random, there is literally no way to break this system (outside of having the codebook and knowing when each pad was used).