Color coding

I have always been interested in the science of cryptography. At an early age, I loved children's magazines, in which the Russian alphabet was given, in which each letter had its encrypted look, and after that it was necessary to guess some encrypted text using this alphabet. What joy such puzzles brought me, I think many of you still remember them.

In this article I will not describe the known methods of encrypting information. Here we talk about color!

The main encryption methods that I know mostly use, so to speak, a character replacement algorithm. Frankly, before writing this article, I did not delve into cryptography and know very little about it. So all that will be written here is our own methods, suggestions and thoughts.

I believe that the color palette provides cryptography with great potential. Let us begin to consider the various color encryption methods that came to my mind. Perhaps some of them already exist and are applied, but I repeat once again I didn’t google much ...

Let's start with the primitive. To get started, take just two colors, black and white. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters, so we draw a field of 33 squares and divide it into 3 lines of 11 squares.



The serial number of the letter in the alphabet will correspond to the square number in this figure, but there is more to it. Let's try to write the phrase "Hello Habr." Below are the alphabetical numbers of each letter of this phrase.

P - 17; P - 18; And - 10; AT 3; E - 6; T - 20; X - 23; A - 1; B - 2; P - 18.

We begin to fill in the squares corresponding to the numbers of letters in black: The
letters P, P are shown below:



We have the letter And the serial number of which is 10. But if we paint 10 cells of our table, it will lose meaning, as we read the words starting with the first letter, and if 10 cells are painted over, the first letter of our word will turn out I. Then, Duplicate our table with 33 squares again and mark the letter in the new table:



Letter B goes under the number - 3, this is less than 10, respectively need again a new table of 33 squares. I will not continue to describe each letter, but I will cite the whole phrase. The encrypted phrase is in one table, the serial number and letter are indicated in the second.



There are many ways to unravel encrypted information. Suppose, in the sentences of the Russian language, the most common letters are A, E, I, O, T, B, C, L, Y, Y. Such ciphers with replacement by signs or other characters are quickly guessed. And such a table of black and white squares will lead a person into a stupor.

And I think that this is the most elementary type of information encryption. Let's try to complicate it.

But what if you reduce the size of the squares to 1px and remove the stroke of the squares? Then you get a picture with something resembling a QR code.



Would you like to complicate the algorithm again? You can rotate our square 90 degrees and get a completely different idea, which will further mislead people trying to solve it.



We will stop here, but not finish. In the upper-case algorithm, only two colors were used, black and white, but what about the rest? They give us even more opportunities.

I hope we still remember that there are 33 letters in Russian? Recall some more basic things that we need. 10 letters of the Russian alphabet vowels are: a, o, y, s, e, i, e, e, u, and. There are 21 consonants: b, c, d, d, d, d, f, h, k, l, m, n, p, p, s, t, f, x, t, h, w, n. And two letters without sounds: b, b.

To indicate the colors, let's take 7 colors of the rainbow. “Every hunter wants to know where the pheasant sits” - well, how could it be without it?



Divide the vowels into two halves of 5 letters. Consonants in three halves of 7 letters. And arrange the colors with the corresponding letters.

• Red color - a, o, y, s, e.
• The orange color is me, e, e, y, and.
• Yellow color - b, c, d, d, d, w, h.
• Green color - k, l, m, n, p, p, s.
• Blue color - t, f, x, t, h, w, n.
• Blue color - b, b.
• Violet color - let's fill it with empty areas. Or you can leave it for punctuation marks.

Take the very same table of 33 three cells divided into 11 rows. And we will paint over the cells according to the same method described above. We will write the phrase "Hello Habr."



Thus, all of our black and white cells became colored. What do these colors allow us to do?

As I wrote above, by color we can greatly complicate the encryption of information. And think about how many shades have colors? And when repeating the letter, we can assign it a completely different shade. It all depends on your imagination and knowledge.

How else can you use colors for encryption? Hmm ... Yes, a lot of ways. Take, for example, color circles. For those who do not know: The color wheel is a tool to help you choose the most pleasant and harmonious colors. It is mainly used and simplifies the work of designers.

You can find such color circles on the Internet, or for example they are in the CorelDRAW program.

Suppose we take such a circle on the Internet:



And for example, when repeating a letter in a phrase or in a sentence, we will rotate the sliders of this circle a certain number of degrees. Or put the main slider in the place of his friend, which will give us completely new colors.

It seems to me that with certain color encryption methods, we can get real works of art that carry secret messages and encrypted information.

I repeat that there can be many options. The question remains only one and most important. Is it possible to create a reverse encryption algorithm for your encrypted message and will it be simple to implement?

If the rules of this site allow you to do the following, you can send various encryption options for the information that you invented to me by e-mail: ritear@mail.ru. And if a large number of interesting options accumulate, then I will write another article with various methods of presenting information in the form of a cipher. In order to facilitate my work, please indicate in the letter the subject “Own encryption methods”, and of course the author of the article, do you want many to hear about you?

Let your comments be my judge.