Independent Mathematical Contractors, Inc.

111 TMCB Provo, UT, 84602 1 September 2012 OCRAI OCRA Creative Recursive Acronyms, Inc. 485 Primality Way Provo, UT 84604 Dear Consulting Scientist Dr. Paul Jenkins: As requested, we have produced an algorithm that will encode text messages through a mobile application as they are sent and decode said text messages as they are received by any device with our application installed. As we understand it, the previous level of security was less than desirable. Through our method of encryption, we will prevent any further embarrassment to the company or harm to future revenue streams. In fact, if any employee attempts to contact the media or your competitors through text messaging, they will be unable to do so. Any mobile device without the ITYC application installed will simply receive the encoded message, with neither rhyme nor reason. This message, in its coded form, will make sense only to the most knowledgeable of cryptographers, such as ourselves. Our inspiration for this algorithm came primarily from the famous Vigenre cipher, invented in the sixteenth century. We first chose a key word, in this case, comedy, whose letters correspond to the numbers (2, 14, 12, 4, 3, 24), respectively. Next, we take the square of each of those numbers, mod 26, in order to increase the difficulty of breaking the code without the application and/or the key. This brings us to the vector V = (4, 14, 14, 16, 9, 4). To encrypt our code, we start by trading out each letter of the alphabet for its corresponding number, i.e. a = 0, b = 1, c = 2, etc. We then look at the position of each letter within the plaintext. Since the length of the key word is 6, we take the position within the text mod 6, and add the corresponding number in that position of vector V.

For example, the 13th letter in the plaintext, mod 6, corresponds to the 1st position of the vector V. Thus, if the 13th letter is I, its alphabet reference is 8, and position 1 of the vector V is occupied by the number 14. Thus, we add 8+14 = 22 (mod 26), for a final numerical reference of 22. To finish the encryption, we convert back into letters, where the number 22 corresponds to the letter W. When applying the above sample key word, comedy, to the sample plaintext fancy-free, begin by removing any punctuation (as well as spaces, if applicable). Then we have the text fancyfree. This translates into the numbers (5, 0, 13, 2, 24, 5, 17, 4, 4). Since the key word is 6 letters long, we start by adding V[0] + 5, V[1] + 0, V[2] + 13, V[3] + 2, V[4] + 24, V[5] + 5, V[0] + 17, V[1] + 4, V[2] + 4. This gives us the new vector (9, 14, 27, 18, 33, 9, 21, 18, 18). After we apply a mod 26, this becomes (9, 14, 1, 18, 7, 9, 21, 18, 18). As we translated the original texts letters into numbers according to their place in the alphabet, we now translate these numbers into ciphertext in the same way. This gives us the result of JOBSHJVSS. This nonsense word will be all that is transmitted to outsiders, while the ITYC application will allow company employees to see the original message. Returning to the problem of your previously limited security measures, we assure you that our cipher will stand up to the most severe scrutinization. Hopefully, our ITYC cipher will bring you peace and security as you text message your colleagues in the future. We look forward to hearing from you soon about the installation of and success in the beta testing of our algorithm. Sincerely,

Charlotte Champenois and Jessica Doud Supervising Developers of the ITYC Application (Information Technology You Crave) Classic Cryptography Department