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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 .
A message encoded with this type of encryption could be decoded with a fixed number on the Caesar cipher. [3] Around 800 AD, Arab mathematician Al-Kindi developed the technique of frequency analysis – which was an attempt to crack ciphers systematically, including the Caesar cipher. [2]
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.
The given input must follow the cipher's process to be solved. Ciphers are commonly used to encrypt written information. Codes operated by substituting according to a large codebook which linked a random string of characters or numbers to a word or phrase. For example, "UQJHSE" could be the code for "Proceed to the following coordinates."
Picking any two ciphers, if the key used is the same for both, the second cipher could possibly undo the first cipher, partly or entirely. This is true of ciphers where the decryption process is exactly the same as the encryption process (a reciprocal cipher) —the second cipher would completely undo the first.
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.
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.
All polyalphabetic ciphers based on the Caesar cipher can be described in terms of the tabula recta. The tabula recta uses a letter square with the 26 letters of the alphabet followed by 26 rows of additional letters, each shifted once to the left from the one above it. This, in essence, creates 26 different Caesar ciphers. [1]