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In cryptography, a Caesar cipher, also known as Caesar's cipher, the shift cipher, Caesar's code, or Caesar shift, is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet .
ROT13 is a special case of the Caesar cipher which was developed in ancient Rome, used by Julius Caesar in the 1st century BC. [1] An early entry on the Timeline of cryptography . ROT13 can be referred by "Rotate13", "rotate by 13 places", hyphenated "ROT-13" or sometimes by its autonym "EBG13".
[5] Several schemes were invented by cryptographers to defeat this weakness in simple substitution encryptions. These included: Homophonic substitution: Use of homophones — several alternatives to the most common letters in otherwise monoalphabetic substitution ciphers. For example, for English, both X and Y ciphertext might mean plaintext E.
The Caesar cipher is an Affine cipher with a = 1 since the encrypting function simply reduces to a linear shift. The Atbash cipher uses a = −1 . Considering the specific case of encrypting messages in English (i.e. m = 26 ), there are a total of 286 non-trivial affine ciphers, not counting the 26 trivial Caesar ciphers.
An early substitution cipher was the Caesar cipher, in which each letter in the plaintext was replaced by a letter three positions further down the alphabet. [23] Suetonius reports that Julius Caesar used it with a shift of three to communicate with his generals. Atbash is an example of an early Hebrew cipher.
A well-known example of a substitution cipher is the Caesar cipher. To encrypt a message with the Caesar cipher, each letter of message is replaced by the letter three positions later in the alphabet. Hence, A is replaced by D, B by E, C by F, etc. Finally, X, Y and Z are replaced by A, B and C respectively.
The Caesar cipher is so simple that even small children can easily grasp the algorithm, it doesn't need code to explain it. Most of the code which was added related to the practicalities of handling different types of string characters rather than the actual algorithm itself. Hut 8.5 20:56, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
In a Caesar cipher, each letter of the alphabet is shifted along some number of places. For example, in a Caesar cipher of shift 3, a would become D, b would become E, y would become B and so on. The Vigenère cipher has several Caesar ciphers in sequence with different shift values.