Confusion
Because both ciphers classically employed novels as part of their key material, many sources confuse the book cipher and the running key cipher. They are really only very distantly related. The running key cipher is a polyalphabetic substitution, the book cipher is a homophonic substitution. Perhaps the distinction is most clearly made by the fact that a running cipher would work best of all with a book of random numbers, whereas such a book (containing no text) would be useless for a book cipher.
Read more about this topic: Running Key Cipher
Famous quotes containing the word confusion:
“Behind her was confusion in the room,
Of chairs turned upside down to sit like people
In other chairs, and something, come to look,
For every room a house has parlor, bedroom,
And dining room thrown pell-mell in the kitchen.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles.
Smiling, in faulty grammar,
She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career.
So to please her I studied—but I will remember always
How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled
All the wild sauces of the brimming year.”
—Mary Oliver (b. 1935)
“The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.”
—Basil Bunting (1900–1985)