In cryptography, Russian copulation is a method of rearranging plaintext before encryption so as to conceal stereotyped headers, salutations, introductions, endings, signatures, etc. This obscures clues for a cryptanalyst, and can be used to increase cryptanalytic difficulty in naive cryptographic schemes (however, most modern schemes contain more rigorous defences; see ciphertext indistinguishability). This is of course desirable for those sending messages and wishing them to remain confidential. Padding is another technique for obscuring such clues.
The technique is to break the starting plaintext message into two parts and then to invert the order of the parts (similar to circular shift). This puts all endings and beginnings (presumably the location of most boilerplate phrases) "somewhere in the middle" of the version of the plaintext that is actually encrypted. For some messages, mostly those not in a human language (e.g., images or tabular data), the decrypted version of the plaintext will present problems when reversing the inversion. For messages expressed in ordinary language, there is sufficient redundancy that the inversion can almost always be reversed by a human immediately on inspection.
The English phrase suggests that it originally came from an observation about Russian cryptographic practice. However, the technique is generally useful and neither was, nor is, limited to use by Russians.
References
- Bauer, Friedrich Ludwig (2007). Decrypted Secrets: Methods and Maxims of Cryptology (4th ed.). Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-3-540-48121-8. Retrieved 15 August 2018.
- A History of U.S. Communications Security; the David G. Boak Lectures, National Security Agency (NSA), Volumes I, 1973, partially released 2008, additional portions declassified October 14, 2015, p. 37, Quote: The KL-7 “was our first machine designed to serve very large nets which could stand matched plain and cipher text. For the first time, the man in the cryptocenter could take a message and simply type it into the machine as written, without changing the spacing between words, or cutting the message in half and sending the last part first. and without having to paraphrase the message text before it was released.”
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