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The Rail Fence cipher is a form of transposition cipher that gets its name from the way in which it is encoded. In the rail fence cipher, the plaintext is written downward and diagonally on successive "rails" of an imaginary fence, then moves up when it gets to the bottom. The message is then read off in rows.
The cipher's key is , the number of rails. If N {\displaystyle N} is known, the ciphertext can be decrypted by using the above algorithm. Values of N {\displaystyle N} equal to or greater than L {\displaystyle L} , the length of the ciphertext, are not usable, since then the ciphertext is the same as the plaintext.
The cipher is a transposition based grille cipher, consisting of a grid with 25 columns and 24 rows. Each row contains 10 randomly placed white cells (to be filled with text) and 15 black cells. [1] The columns are labeled with shuffled digraphs and numbers and the rows with digraphs. [3]
Many transposition ciphers are similar to these two examples, usually involving rearranging the letters into rows or columns and then taking them in a systematic way to transpose the letters. Other examples include the Vertical Parallel and the Double Transposition Cipher.
Although ciphers can be confusion-only (substitution cipher, one-time pad) or diffusion-only (transposition cipher), any "reasonable" block cipher uses both confusion and diffusion. [2] These concepts are also important in the design of cryptographic hash functions , and pseudorandom number generators , where decorrelation of the generated ...
The first letter of each ciphertext pair is the row, and the second ciphertext letter is the column, of the plaintext letter in the grid (e.g., "AF" means "row A, column F, in the grid"). Next, the fractionated message is subject to a columnar transposition. The message is written in rows under a transposition key (here "CARGO"):
A scytale. In cryptography, a scytale (/ ˈ s k ɪ t əl iː /; also transliterated skytale, Ancient Greek: σκυτάλη skutálē "baton, cylinder", also σκύταλον skútalon) is a tool used to perform a transposition cipher, consisting of a cylinder with a strip of parchment wound around it on which is written a message.
The history of cryptology in Japan shows two things. First, the fact that substitution ciphers existed makes the failure of the Japanese to improve on the substitution cipher or to invent the transposition cipher much harder to explain. Second, the lack of a strong cryptographic tradition suggests – almost requires – a correspondingly weak ...