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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 ...
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.
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.
For a repeating-key polyalphabetic cipher arranged into a matrix, the coincidence rate within each column will usually be highest when the width of the matrix is a multiple of the key length, and this fact can be used to determine the key length, which is the first step in cracking the system.
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.
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.
Stream ciphers, in contrast to the 'block' type, create an arbitrarily long stream of key material, which is combined with the plaintext bit-by-bit or character-by-character, somewhat like the one-time pad. In a stream cipher, the output stream is created based on a hidden internal state that changes as the cipher operates.
Many of the classical ciphers can be broken even if the attacker only knows sufficient ciphertext and hence they are susceptible to a ciphertext-only attack. Some classical ciphers (e.g., the Caesar cipher) have a small key space. These ciphers can be broken with a brute force attack, that is by simply trying out all keys.