Transcript slides - Seidenberg School of CSIS

Musical Cryptography
Norissa Lamaute, Alexa Piccoli, Li-Chiou Chen, and Andreea
Cotoranu
Research Goals
▪ To create a musical cipher that the sender could use to mask
a message effectively, not necessarily by making the message
harder to decrypt, but rather by making the message sound
inconspicuous and difficult to detect as cipher.
▪ To the unsuspecting ear, our messages will sound like regular
tunes, but to someone expecting a secret message, the music
would be simple to decode.
Cryptography
▪ Then main goal of cryptography is to create a way to protect
information from an adversary
▪ There are different mathematical transformations one can use
to convert plain text into cipher text including permutations,
combinations, transpositions, etc.
▪ The message must be easy to encrypt but difficult to decrypt,
unless the recipient of the message has a secret passcode or
key.
Cryptography vocabulary
▪ Encryption = the process of converting plain text into cipher
text.
▪ Decryption = the process of converting cipher text into plain
text.
Music Theory
▪ There are 12 tones in a
chromatic scale meaning
that there are 12 keys black
and white in between C and
the following B on a piano
▪ A major scale uses 7 of the
keys
▪ W-W-H-W-W-W-H
Music Theory cont.
▪ Key signatures show which
black keys on the piano to
use
▪ Find the next major scale
key signature by using circle
of fifths
▪ Use the reverse for the major
flat scales (fourths)
▪ Inner circle shows relative
minor keys.
Music Theory cont.
▪ Quarter notes take up 1 full
beat and in a common time
signature, there can be up to
4 per measure.
▪ A sixteenth note takes up ¼
of a beat and in a common
time, there can be up to 16
per measure.
▪ An eighth note takes up ½
of a beat and in common
time, there can be 8 notes
per measure.
▪ A triplet note takes up ⅓ of
a beat and in common time,
there can be up to 12 per
measure.
Substitution Cipher
▪ A monoalphabetic cipher (or substitution cipher) is the
simplest type of cipherkey
▪ This cipher encrypts each individual character in the plaintext
alphabet with an individual character in the ciphertext
alphabet.
Substitution Cipher cont.
Ex. Cesar Cipher
▪ If any iteration were to have the key of 2 or B, the alphabet
would shift from
▪ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
to
▪ BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZA
▪ As a result, the plain text message “HELLO” become cipher text
“IDMMP.”
Purposed Musical Cipher
• The goal of our encryption cipher is to generate a cipher key that
will abide by the conventions of music theory.
• We intend to avoid dissonance and uneven beats in a measure
by creating a key that stays in one key signature in the context of
a single major scale to generate a tune pleasing to the ear,
regardless of the plain text composition.
Proposed Musical Cipher cont.
▪ The letters are ordered by their frequency in the English
language.
▪ In order to generate a consonant cipher, we arranged the
notes by fifths.
▪ We then assigned each individual letter a rhythm or beat
division so that two letters with the same note can sound
different
Proposed Musical Cipher cont.
Proposed Musical Cipher cont.
▪ Using this cipher, the plain text “hello” in the key of C major is
encrypted into cipher text “C50 C100 A50 A50 A100
Existing Methods
▪ There are other methods for Musical Cryptography that have
been researched.
▪ Variations of substitution ciphers are used.
▪ Our research differs in that we aim to make the music sound
consonant by abiding to classical music theory standards.
▪ This research relies on the Ionic scale which generates a more
harmonic cipher text.
Results and Future Work
▪ We were successful in creating a cipher table that generated
consonant sounds, but the cipher itself does not have strong
security.
▪ The application of the proposed cipher can be combined with
existing public key or private key encryption algorithms
▪ It should also be limited to encrypting information that is short
in length to make statistical analysis of the cipher text harder
Acknowledgements
▪ The authors would like to acknowledge GE Capital for funding
the “STEM Women Achieve Greatness” program at Pace
University.
▪ The funding made it possible for us to conduct a collaborative
research workshop with high school girls at Pace University
during spring 2016.
▪ The high school student participants, Allegra Copeland, Jenna
Dolgetta, Kayley Lewis, and Kyra Wilkowski, were asked to
contribute their own ideas for musical cryptography models,
which were all taken into consideration when conducting this
study.
The end.
Thank you!