Litvinenko brought British special services into the times of Sherlock Holmes

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Increase of circulation of a book called Rubashka by Russian author Yevgeny Grishkovets that was mentioned by Andrei Lugovoi (he was charged by the UK prosecution with murder of Alexander Litvinenko) has not met an unambiguously positive reaction by the writer, as he is unwilling to make its new popularity being dependant on the Litvinenko case. However, the discussion on how the events will influence the fate of the book overshadowed another point of interest: how the Rubashka novel, as Lugovoi said, could be used in an effort to encrypt?

To remind, Lugovoi explained that Litvinenko, in an attempt to recruit him to work for British intelligence, gave him special “means for secure connection.” They included a cellular phone with a British SIM and the Rubashka novel. Numbers of pages, paragraphs and lines were supposed to be used in the encryption process.

A REGNUM correspondent asked a leading Russian specialist in cryptography on how plausible usage of such method of communication by British intelligence is.

According to the expert, encryption of messages “by a book” has not been considered safe long ago. The gist of the method is simple: both sides have one and the same book, and each message uses place of a letter in the book instead of using the letter itself. Ideally, new “coordinates” of the letter must be mentioned each time. However, in practice, it makes communication inadmissibly slow and so easier variants are used. For instance, coordinates of whole words are mentioned instead of letters, at least this happens to the shortest and most often mentioned words. Or mention ones and the same coordinates for some certain letters. All this, as the expert believes, makes the encryption faster, but more vulnerable as well. There is reliable information on how frequently various letters and most often mentioned words are used. And if the encoded message is long enough, the code can be discovered by paying attention to what coordinates can be seen there most frequently. A specialist can do such work in hand, even without using a computer.

“It is hard to say whether the way of encoding mentioned by Lugovoi is used in the British intelligence or it was just used as a way for having fun by persons who get a false idea of being its collaborators. Anyway, as far as I know, today the ‘book code’ is used by quite an unexpected range of social groups. On the one hand, it has been popular among criminals. On the other hand, celebrities often use it in order to protect themselves from bugging by all sorts of paparazzi. They believe such method to be a more ‘advanced’ one than replacing words in a phone talk. However, to all appearances, neither of the methods provides confidentiality for them: scandals with tapping and bugging celebrities are taking place worldwide. As for using the ‘book code’ by the UK intelligence, it reminds of the times of Sherlock Holmes to me. Well, it is rather strange that Lugovoi did not mention a book by Conan Doyle,” joked the expert.