At 20:01 2/19/96, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

Are you refering to rotors, by any chance? Rotors are World War II era technology. Of course, who can even guess what you are talking about. You make about as much sense as the people handing out xeroxed pamphlets on the street corner informing all comers about the fact that they are being controlled by aliens.

I think what he means is that they use virtual rotors built out of very long primes. I.e., write down n very long primes, one per line. Shift each prime number by a the number of positions indicated in an m by n key. Pick a column. Read the column top to bottom. Use the resulting number to xor with your cleartext of lenght <= n. If the cleartext is > n, use the next column(s) as well. Just a guess. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.