The VIC cipher was a pencil and paper cipher used by the Soviet spy Reino Hayhanen, codenamed "VICTOR". This article is about algorithms for encryption and decryption. ... State motto: Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь! (transliteration: Proletarii vsekh stran, soedinyaytes!) (Russian, Workers of the world, unite!) Official language None; Russian (de facto) Capital Moscow Area  - Total  - % water 1st before collapse 22,402,200 km²  ?% Population  - Total  - Density 3rd before collapse 293,047,571 (July 1991) 13. ... Spy and secret agent redirect here; for alternate use, see Spy (disambiguation) and Secret agent (disambiguation). ... A code name or cryptonym is a word or name used clandestinely to refer to another name or word. ...

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. A computer is a device or machine for processing information according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. ... The operation of A5/1, a LFSR-based stream cipher used to encrypt mobile phone conversations. ... In cryptography, a block cipher is a symmetric key cipher which operates on fixed-length groups of bits, termed blocks, with an unvarying transformation. ... Cryptanalysis (from the Greek kryptós, hidden, and analýein, to loosen or to untie) is the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information without access to the secret information which is normally required to do so. ... NSA can stand for: National Security Agency of the USA The British Librarys National Sound Archive This page concerning a three-letter acronym or abbreviation is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) (previously named the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS)) is the main British intelligence service providing signals intelligence (SIGINT). ... 1953 is a common year starting on Thursday. ... A defector is generally a person who gives up allegiance to a certain country in exchange for allegiance to another. ... 1957 was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

The VIC cipher has several components, including a base 10 lagged Fibonacci generator, 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. Decimal, or denary, notation is the most common way of writing the base 10 numeral system, which uses various symbols for ten distinct quantities (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, called digits) together with the decimal point and the sign symbols + (plus) and − (minus) to... A Lagged Fibonacci generator (LFG) is an example of a pseudorandom number generator. ... In cryptography, a straddling checkerboard is a device for converting an alphabetic plaintext into digits whilst simultaneously achieving fractionation (a simple form of information diffusion) and homophony (a simple method for suppressing peaks of the frequency distribution). ... In classical cryptography, a transposition cipher changes one character from the plaintext to another (to decrypt the reverse is done). ...

External links

• John Savard's page on the VIC cipher
• The SECOM cipher, a VIC variant with extended checkerboard

See also: Topics in cryptography. This article is intended to be an analytic glossary, or alternatively, an organized collection of annotated pointers. ...