Today I present the story of Lord Armey, Lady Penelope, and Lady Penelope’s sister, Lady Maleficent, along with Countess Katerina, a Russian émigré bookstore proprietor whose shop is visited frequently by both Lord Armey and Lady Penelope.
Lord Armey, Viscount Huddleston, is desperately in love with the daughter of the Duke of Pemberly, Lady Penelope, who returns his affections. Their families, though, have been waging a feud for hundreds of years. Were Lord Armey to show up on the Duke of Pemberley’s doorstop asking to pay his addresses to Lady Penelope, assuming he wasn’t shot on sight, he would not be admitted to the house. Needless to say, any letters he might send would be intercepted, read, and discarded. Lady Penelope’s correspondence is likewise monitored. The only way for Lord Armey and Lady Penelope to communicate and ultimately plan their elopement, then, is in secret. They need to find a way to get messages to and from each other without the Duke of Pemberly, or his other daughter, Lady Penelope’s viciously jealous sister, Lady Maleficent, reading the messages and foiling the couple’s plans.
Lord Armey and Lady Penelope are huge admirers of the Russian author, Leo Tolstoy. In fact, they initially met at Countess Katerina’s, a Russian émigré, bookstore, when they were at her shop at the same time to pick up their translated copies of War and Peace and bumped into each other on the way in and out. For months afterward they would make their way to the bookstore to meet in secret and sip tea from the Countess’ samovar, but once Lady Maleficent became suspicious of her sister’s happy demeanor she started following her around town, so meeting at the bookstore wasn’t safe any longer. Sending letters to and from Lady Penelope’s house was too dangerous, because of possibility of interception. Lord Armey and Lady Penelope began to despair of how they could communicate secretly.
Countess Katerina offered to help - a woman of the world, the wife of a late diplomat, there wasn’t much she hadn’t seen in her three score and then some years and nothing scandalized her. At first the trio considered using the Countess a mere go-between, with Lord Armey dropping off his letter for Lady Penelope at the shop and the Countess holding it there until Lady Penelope could visit to retrieve it, but then they remembered how Lady Maleficent was stalking Lady Penelope and worried she might try to bribe one of the Countess’ clerks to gain information – and a letter written in plain English was too easy for anyone who came across it to understand. Then, it came to them: Countess Katerina spoke not only traditional Russian, but also an obscure dialect learned from her grandmother who grew up in the Ninilchik region (now considered part of Alaska, belonging to the United States of America). Lord Armey would give the Countess his note for Lady Penelope, in English. The Countess would translate the letter into Ninilchik, burn Lord Armey’s original letter, and leave the translated version locked in her desk – that way if any turncoat clerks ran across the letter they would have no idea what it contained. When Lady Penelope visited the bookstore the Countess would quickly translate the Ninilchik letter back into English and give it to Lady Penelope. When Lady Penelope had written her response, the Countess did the same process, converting the English into Ninilchik, destroying the original, and saving the translated letter for Lord Armey’s next visit. In this way, Lord Armey and Lady Penelope were able - even under the surveillance of Lady Maleficent - to plan their elopement, which was successfully conducted that Christmas, when they escaped to Gretna Green, in Scotland, and after the mandatory 21-day waiting period declared themselves married in front of the local blacksmith.
To compare this scenario to Stallings’ “Simplified Model of Symmetric Encryption”, there are five ingredients to symmetric encryption: the plaintext input is the letter in English written by Lord Armey’s/Lady Penelope, the secret key shared by sender and recipient is Countess Katerina’s assistance, the encryption algorithm is the Ninilchik dialect spoken/written by the Countess, the transmitted ciphertext is the Ninilchik-translated letter stored in the Countess’ desk at the shop, the decryption algorithm is the Countess taking her Ninilchik letter and turning it back into English, and the plaintext output is the letter in English read by Lady Penelope/Lord Armey.
Using simply Russian as an encryption algorithm would not have been sufficiently secure, since Russian is a known language, even if Lady Maleficent or her father weren’t fluent in it. They could have taken it to someone who was. By using the Countess’ obscure knowledge of Ninilchik, essentially a secret dialect by then, given the village’s location in the USA, the messages were secure enough from prying eyes, even if Ninilchik wasn’t a complete secret. It’s clear Lady Maleficent suspected the Countess’ bookstore but she did not know exactly how the Countess was involved or that there was a translated letter, and the Countess’ assistance remained a secret key.