🚀 go-pugleaf

    This is a bit out of the mainstream of the topics in this group, but I
think it's still in keeping with the main idea.

    I was playing around the other day with developing a transcripted
shorthand that is fairly secure.  Obviously this will be much weaker than,
say, crypt or the DES, but I wonder if there can be some "reasonable"
degree of security in a written code.

    One of the limiting requirements is that I want to be able to write it
down quickly, without doing calculations for each symbol, so it would have
to be something like an substitution alphabet.  In addition, I tailored my
symbols to be easy to write quickly; ideally I'd like to be able to write
at a speed comparable to (faster than?) writing standard English text.

    So what I ended up with last night is basically a simple substitution
cipher with some tricks tossed in to lightly screw up letter distribution
(since, in my understanding, the "etaoinshrdlu" attack is very effective
for transcribed English code).  I basically did things like encode double
letters differently, combine some symbols (like "ng"), drop vowels
occasionally, and the like.

    So are there other tricks for developing such an encryption?  Are
there any references for this sort of thing?  Also, does anybody know 
how many different types of shorthand there are?

_____________________________________________________________________________
Steve Hollasch                                  Kubota Pacific Computer, Inc.
hollasch@kpc.com                                Santa Clara, California