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As per specifications document,

"We have the natural restriction that at least two characters must be ciphered, i.e. $b \geq 2$"

where each character is represented by an integer of certain cardinality. So basically a $2$ integer array is the minimum.

However say I want to encrypt a single input integer but restrict it to a certain range. For example say the cardinality of the integer was $2000$ (so the range of possible values from $0 - 1999$).

Can this be done using BPS? (i.e. Would it be acceptable to simply input an integer array of size one to the algorithm with the cardinality as the range I want?)

I am trying to encrypt a year, but in a way that does not result in a year greater than current year.

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This can't be done in a straightforward way with just BPS, since the straightforward way will result in a year greater than the current one for roughly 80% of ciphertexts (since 9999 is the biggest four-digit ciphertext possible). However, using what's called a "rank-then-encipher" scheme, you can specify an input and output format using a regex, then build an FPE scheme on just the strings matching that regex. See this site for details.

EDIT: Also, I don't know BPS that well but I think the "integer of a certain cardinality" can just be a base-10 digit, so you can encrypt a four-digit year as four characters.

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  • $\begingroup$ I'm not clear on how the regex part works, (i.e. the conversion from one format to another). I haven't found an example illustrating the process, but I'll examine the source code for LibFTE in the meantime. $\endgroup$
    – erotavlas
    Commented Jan 25, 2016 at 16:32
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    $\begingroup$ You'd specify a regex for a four-digit year not greater than the current year, then pass that as a parameter to the FPE scheme. Internally, it compiles the regex to a state machine, then uses the description of that state machine to create a "ranking table" used during encryption and decryption. $\endgroup$
    – pg1989
    Commented Jan 25, 2016 at 19:10
  • $\begingroup$ After reading further I found something called DFA or Deterministic Finite Automata. Is each state in the DFA table ranked? If so doesn't that still give you a single integer to encrypt (over a finite range of states)? I'm just not clear what the numeric input value is to the FPE - in this case of BPS what the integer array consists of. Do I need to convert the integer - I was thinking positional notation and base conversion to get a series of numbers. Oh wait maybe I could just convert to binary and encode that? $\endgroup$
    – erotavlas
    Commented Jan 27, 2016 at 5:28
  • $\begingroup$ Your input to the algorithm is a string of "characters" in some alphabet. That alphabet could be binary, in which case your characters will be zeroes and ones. That alphabet could also be base-10, in which case your characters will be decimal digits. $\endgroup$
    – pg1989
    Commented Jan 27, 2016 at 19:36
  • $\begingroup$ I get that, but I need more than one character for the encryption to work. Say I use a ranking scheme to enumerate all dates between range 1901 - 2001 so 100 items, that yields one character in my 'alphabet' I'm not encrypting sequences of multiple dates side by side, only one. I don't see how enumerating states in a DFA gets around this. Otherwise i need to find a new FPE that works on single integers, but there must be a way to at least modify this one to work in my case. $\endgroup$
    – erotavlas
    Commented Jan 27, 2016 at 22:14

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