ShuttlePads Cipher as it Stands.

ShuttlePads Cipher as it Stands.

[Austin Obyrne]

The cipher is up and running in the Ada-95 programming language in there modes.

Mark_0 is a widely expanded diagnostic version with considerable annotations here and there while marks 1 and 2 are work versions that have no comment or annotations.

Mark_0 comes with a lot of personal commenting and ad hoc variable names that will need to be updated by refinement sometime in the future.  It is easy to forget that this is development work that has been on-going daily for about six months now and it has been very exploratory some of the time - not much time has been given to cosmetic programming - whatever comes to mind as a suitable variable name is often adopted very quickly .

I make no apologies for my style of programming which is I contend, deliberately workman-like sourcecode and is highly transparent for what I venture to say could be helpful to newbies who have to marry the cryptography to the Ada programming language sometimes without any prior experience to speak of in either of these disciplines.

A salient feature of this cipher is that it reads in data directly from prepared batch files and in real time from keyed in email files.  Everything is done in decimal-base arithmetic albeit not a number-theoretic cipher per se.  The cipher has one-to-one ciphertext volumetric ratio and will run in any Ada compiler that can be hosted by any device from mainframe computers to modern hand-held tablets (mobile phone encryptions using 'shuttlepads' is a possibility in mind for future - (any body please inform current viability).

Feedback from well-informed sci crypt readers seems to be giving shuttle pads the nod for acceptance as viable cryptography for possible use in main stream cryptography.

As the writer of 'Shuttlepads' I am seeing it for the present as just the core intelligence of a crypto scheme that has potential for development later for future use perhaps.  I think it could become ubiquitous for personal cryptography on home computers for instance.

The cipher to hand uses 15 pads.  A database of 95 pads (that was a lot of work) is to hand also and future experiments will study whether it is profitable to increase on 15 pads or just 'let the hare sit' at the present 15.

adacrypt