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In polyalphabetic substitution ciphers where the substitution alphabets are chosen by the use of a keyword, the Kasiski examination allows a cryptanalyst to deduce the length of the keyword. Once the length of the keyword is discovered, the cryptanalyst lines up the ciphertext in n columns, where n is the length of the keyword.
Despite the Vigenère cipher's apparent strength, it never became widely used throughout Europe. The Gronsfeld cipher is a variant attributed by Gaspar Schott to Count Gronsfeld (Josse Maximilaan van Gronsveld né van Bronckhorst) but was actually used much earlier by an ambassador of Duke of Mantua in 1560s-1570s. It is identical to the ...
A polyalphabetic cipher is a substitution, using multiple substitution alphabets. The Vigenère cipher is probably the best-known example of a polyalphabetic cipher, though it is a simplified special case. The Enigma machine is more complex but is still fundamentally a polyalphabetic substitution cipher.
1854 – Charles Wheatstone invents the Playfair cipher; c. 1854 – Babbage's method for breaking polyalphabetic ciphers (pub 1863 by Kasiski) 1855 – For the English side in Crimean War, Charles Babbage broke Vigenère's autokey cipher (the 'unbreakable cipher' of the time) as well as the much weaker cipher that is called Vigenère cipher ...
It is very similar to the Vigenère cipher, making many scholars call Bellaso its inventor, although unlike the modern Vigenère cipher Bellaso didn't use 26 different "shifts" (different Caesar's ciphers) for every letter, instead opting for 13 shifts for pairs of letters. The system is still periodic although the use of one or more long ...
Traditional stream ciphers such as RC4 do not support an explicit IV as input, and a custom solution for incorporating an IV into the cipher's key or internal state is needed. Some designs realized in practice are known to be insecure; the WEP protocol is a notable example, and is prone to related-IV attacks.
In 1863, Kasiski published a 95-page book on cryptography, Die Geheimschriften und die Dechiffrir-Kunst (German, "Secret writing and the Art of Deciphering"). This was the first published account of a procedure for attacking polyalphabetic substitution ciphers, especially the Vigenère cipher (although it is possible Charles Babbage was already aware of a similar method but had not published it).
The cipher's key is , the number of rails. If is known, the ciphertext can be decrypted by using the above algorithm. Values of equal to or greater than , the length of the ciphertext, are not usable, since then the ciphertext is the same as the plaintext. Therefore the number of usable keys is low, allowing the brute-force attack of trying all ...