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Hill's cipher machine, from figure 4 of the patent. In classical cryptography, the Hill cipher is a polygraphic substitution cipher based on linear algebra.Invented by Lester S. Hill in 1929, it was the first polygraphic cipher in which it was practical (though barely) to operate on more than three symbols at once.
In cryptography, unicity distance is the length of an original ciphertext needed to break the cipher by reducing the number of possible spurious keys to zero in a brute force attack. That is, after trying every possible key , there should be just one decipherment that makes sense, i.e. expected amount of ciphertext needed to determine the key ...
Gillogly worked as a computer scientist at RAND, specializing in system design and development, and computer security.He has written several articles about technology and cryptography, is currently the editor of the "Cipher Exchange" column for The Cryptogram, and was president of the American Cryptogram Association.
However the system was impractical and probably never actually used. The earliest practical digraphic cipher (pairwise substitution), was the so-called Playfair cipher, invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1854. In this cipher, a 5 x 5 grid is filled with the letters of a mixed alphabet (two letters, usually I and J, are combined).
In 1854, Charles Wheatstone came up with the Playfair cipher, a keyword-based system that could be performed on paper in the field. This was followed up over the next fifty years with the closely related four-square and two-square ciphers, which are slightly more cumbersome but offer slightly better security.
A good tutorial on reconstructing the key for a Playfair cipher can be found in chapter 7, "Solution to Polygraphic Substitution Systems," of Field Manual 34-40-2, produced by the United States Army. Another cryptanalysis of a Playfair cipher can be found in Chapter XXI of Helen Fouché Gaines' Cryptanalysis / a study of ciphers and their ...
In the past, part A cryptograms have been encrypted with the Caesar cipher, the Affine cipher, the Keyword cipher, the Transposition cipher, the Vigenère cipher and the 2x2 Hill cipher. The part B challenges are intended to be harder.
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