Bart13 asks:
Why is the author of this challenge not responding to the questions asked?
I replied to Veselovský on Aug 24, 2019 in the "A Cloaked Substitution Cipher — Part 1" topic:
I will reply to your questions and then say no more on this subject.
I sensed that he, for whaatever reason, seems to bear some animosity toward me (first shown in several posts on February 22, 2019 about the Weakened Handycipher Parts 1 and 2 challenges) and decided not to dignify his mischief-making with any further responses.
But now he writes:
After this second part of the challenge being published and also reading this article http://eprint.iacr.org/2019/621.pdf by the same author I had to reconsider my attitude to the matter.
I want to stress out two things:
One thing is not realizing that some two encryption procedures might be commutative - not realizing for whatever reason (mistake, ignorance or neglecting). And then "inventing" cipher that its principal differences from original cipher reduce to less than cosmetic differences. We are humans prone to making mistakes. It is OK and it has nothing to do with morality.
But the other thing is amending some cipher (either with reasonable or irrelevant amendments), coining a new name for it and then presenting it as something new without mentioning sources of original cipher. It is called plagiarism - the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. An this is morally low.
It is evident that the author copied my ideas and work from Camouflage series here on Mystery Twister site and then presented it on Cryptology ePrint Archive (http://eprint.iacr.org) as his own work without even trying to add something new to it - and what is worse - without mentioning sources.
My Camouflage challenges were published since 2011. The author (curmudgeon) of Cloaked cipher is member of Mystery Twister from Jan 13, 2014 so it is evident that he was aware of Camouflage cipher and copied it in his article published on 1 Jun 2019 on Cryptology ePrint Archive.
I am not very happy with that.
and then goes on to write:
And last question:
Why the article published on ePrint Archive should not be considered as a plagiarism?
Clearly such a scurrilous attack on my integrity needs to be answered.
To begin with, the idea of inserting decoy characters into a ciphertext did not originate with Viktor Veselovský and can be found in the early history of cryptology. Moreover, it's been an essential element of the Handycipher encryption algorithm from the beginning of its development. See https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/257.pdf and in particular Section 5: Complementary Keys, where the idea of splitting a plaintext into two parts and encrypting them with complementary keys is introduced.
In Section 6: Deniable Encryption, that idea is used to generate a ciphertext that will be decrypted to any two different chosen plaintexts using two complementaary keys. This led to my simplifying the idea by using a simple substitution cipher in place of the Handycipher core cipher and writing the paper "A Modified Simple Substitution Cipher With Unbounded Unicity Distance" https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/621.pdf which Veselovský now insists was taking his work and ideas and passing them off as my own.
In fact I had no knowledge of the MTC3 Camouflage challenges until many months after writing the Unbounded Unicity paper. Thinking that it could form the basis of a worthwhile MTC3 challenge, I proceded to write it up but before submitting it noticed that the cipher I described was essentially the same as that used in the Camouflage challenges. In writing the challenge description I was careful to point this out, linking to the Camouflage challenges and stating that the two ciphers were similar in all essential ways and only differed in a few non-essential ways that I enumeraated.