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The Aristocrat Cipher is a type of monoalphabetic substitution cipher in which plaintext is replaced with ciphertext and encoded into assorted letters, numbers, and symbols based on a keyword. The formatting of these ciphers generally includes a title, letter frequency, keyword indicators, and the encoder's nom de plume . [ 1 ]
Weak ciphers do not sufficiently mask the distribution, and this might be exploited by a cryptanalyst to read the message. In cryptanalysis, frequency analysis (also known as counting letters) is the study of the frequency of letters or groups of letters in a ciphertext. The method is used as an aid to breaking classical ciphers.
A monoalphabetic cipher uses fixed substitution over the entire message, whereas a polyalphabetic cipher uses a number of substitutions at different positions in the message, where a unit from the plaintext is mapped to one of several possibilities in the ciphertext and vice versa.
The earliest example of the homophonic substitution cipher is the one used by Duke of Mantua in the early 1400s. [24] Homophonic cipher replaces each letter with multiple symbols depending on the letter frequency. The cipher is ahead of the time because it combines monoalphabetic and polyalphabetic features.
The cipher now known as the Vigenère cipher, however, is based on that originally described by Giovan Battista Bellaso in his 1553 book La cifra del Sig. Giovan Battista Bellaso. [8] He built upon the tabula recta of Trithemius but added a repeating "countersign" (a key) to switch cipher alphabets every letter.
The affine cipher is a type of monoalphabetic substitution cipher, where each letter in an alphabet is mapped to its numeric equivalent, encrypted using a simple mathematical function, and converted back to a letter. The formula used means that each letter encrypts to one other letter, and back again, meaning the cipher is essentially a ...
In World War I, the breaking of the Zimmermann Telegram was instrumental in bringing the United States into the war. In World War II, the Allies benefitted enormously from their joint success cryptanalysis of the German ciphers – including the Enigma machine and the Lorenz cipher – and Japanese ciphers, particularly 'Purple' and JN-25.
Classical ciphers are typically vulnerable to known-plaintext attack. For example, a Caesar cipher can be solved using a single letter of corresponding plaintext and ciphertext to decrypt entirely. A general monoalphabetic substitution cipher needs several character pairs and some guessing if there are fewer than 26 distinct pairs.