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In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encrypting in which units of plaintext are replaced with the ciphertext, in a defined manner, with the help of a key; the "units" may be single letters (the most common), pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth.
The Caesar cipher is named after Julius Caesar, who, according to Suetonius, used it with a shift of three (A becoming D when encrypting, and D becoming A when decrypting) to protect messages of military significance. [4] While Caesar's was the first recorded use of this scheme, other substitution ciphers are known to have been used earlier. [5 ...
ROT13 is a simple letter substitution cipher that replaces a letter with the 13th letter after it in the Latin 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.
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.
Another example of a polyalphabetic substitution cipher that is much more difficult to decode is the Vigenère square, an innovative encoding method. With the square, there are 26 different cipher alphabets that are used to encrypt text. Each cipher alphabet is just another rightward Caesar shift of the original alphabet.
Historical pen and paper ciphers used in the past are sometimes known as classical ciphers. They include simple substitution ciphers (such as ROT13) and transposition ciphers (such as a Rail Fence Cipher). For example, "GOOD DOG" can be encrypted as "PLLX XLP" where "L" substitutes for "O", "P" for "G", and "X" for "D" in the message.
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 ...
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.