Questions tagged [substitution-cipher]

A substitution cipher is an encryption algorithm which works by replacing plaintext units with corresponding ciphertext units, following some rule depending on the key.

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Possible ways to crack simple hand ciphers?

We had a quiz in class today where we had to break the ciphertext with the key given, but not the algorithm. Suffice to say that I wasn't able to decrypt it within the allotted time of 12 mins and ...
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Can an Enigma-style cipher of sufficient complexity be considered secure today?

Regarding the German Enigma machines, if I recall correctly, the reason they were defeated was because the Allies were able to generate a massive database of possible rotor settings, and because the ...
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What are the main weaknesses of a Playfair cipher, if any?

What are the main weaknesses of a Playfair cipher, if any? I know that they depend on none of the letters missing, but that is an easy fix if a letter gets dropped. Besides that, are there any other ...
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Encryption/ciphers/codes in Chinese

I am quite curious as to how you can perform simple encryption for the Chinese language. Saw a similar question related to encryption/Chinese here: About cryptography in a character language, however ...
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Why was the winner of the AES competition not a Feistel cipher?

The winner of the AES competition has a structure that does not qualify as a Feistel cipher, as explained in answers to this recent question. However, most many of the AES candidates, and all 3 out ...
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About Cryptography in a Character Language

Suppose I had a message in Chinese (or another non-phonetic language) and I wanted to encipher it. Some of the simplest encryptions in English are substitution ciphers, but such ciphers don't seem ...
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Does composing multiple substitution ciphers improve security?

Will using two substitution ciphers one after the another be more secure than using single substitution cipher?
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Is the Caesar cipher really a cipher?

In this lecture by Dan Boneh on Coursera it was stated at minute 03:37 that The Caesar cipher, actually, is not a cipher at all. And the reason is that it doesn't have a key. What a Caesar cipher ...
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How to solve cipher encrypted with Vigenère + Columnar Transposition?

Vigenère's weakness is Kasiski's test and index of coincidence. However, if you put columnar transposition on top of Vigenère, that weakness is gone. The text is now shuffled and you can't search for ...
Pavancho Emiliano's user avatar
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How does the ring settings of enigma change wiring tables?

EDIT: The model I'm trying to make is "Enigma 1". I learned initially about it from a book called "Code Book" and then looked at it in detail from its wikipedia page. The site wont allow me too add ...
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Why is the Keyspace of a Substitution Cipher not 2^26 but 2^88

It is known that a cipher has a keyspace of cryptographic algorithm whose key length is $n$ is given by $2^n$, but the keyspace of the substitution cipher is $2^{88}$ which is an approximation of $26!$...
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Is a book cipher provably secure?

I've seen ciphers (usually in spy drama shows) that involve taking a book and writing down an index to individual characters. Essentially it's a keyed substitution cipher, where the key is the name ...
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How to perform frequency analysis of a substitution cipher using a Base64 alphabet

Let's imagine a cipher that works like the following: Plaintext is encoded to Base64. The characters in the encoded plaintext are substituted with a randomly shuffled character set(A-z, 0-9, -, _, =)....
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Toy cipher -- does it have a name?

When I was perhaps nine years, I borrowed a book from the library on various maths and CS topics. It outlined various simple ciphers, including one that I used a lot, just for fun. I can't remember ...
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Alphabetic Substitution with Symbols

I was reading on a site about the Zodiac Killer and how he used a basic substitution cipher, but instead of substituting english letters and characters he substituted symbols. I was wondering, if you ...
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Does Format Preserving Encryption have significant advantages over a randomly generated lookup table?

I have a need to anonymise phone numbers so that I can carry out testing and analysis work on telecoms data sets and comply with GDPR. I typically receive a batch of a few hundred thousand events ...
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Not-So-Simple Substitution Cipher?

The first go-to weakness when talking about substitution ciphers is frequency analysis. It assumes that there's a simple 1 to 1 character mapping between the plain text and the cipher text. Could a ...
Corey Ogburn's user avatar
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Does adding more characters to the Enigma rotors improve crypto strength?

This seems like an obvious question but I haven't been able to find it, so here goes: Enigma is based on an alphabet of A-Z (26 characters); obviously this directly affects message content (e.g. ...
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Can you help me find a cryptanalytic way to attack a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher algorithm?

I have decided to make a project at uni that requires me to crack a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. The text is an english text with spaces. The key is a permutation of the alphabet. This isn’t ...
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Relative security of a Vigenère cipher

Within a closed computer network, I am ciphering some plaintext data as an added security measure. This is below several other layers of protection. For various technical reasons, I am restricted to ...
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Using a mono-alphabetic substitution cipher with a different language per word

How much harder is it to determine the secret key for a mono-alphabetic substitution cipher, if each word is translated into a different language before the cipher is applied? If somehow computers ...
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What is an accurate definition for a 'Monoalphabetic substitution cipher' and why does it provide a poor level of security

From my research online, I am confused about the difference between a 'monoalphabetic cipher' and 'monoalphabetic substitution cipher'. However, I have got my answer from the websites Kifanga and ...
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How do I test my encryption? (absolute amateur)

I am a hobby programmer with a background in biology and have developed an encryption program based on DNA. I tried to make it hard to crack, but it's essentially a substitution cipher and uses the ...
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Can you break a multi language code using Frequency analysis?

Let say that I wrote a 26 letter alphabet, each letter of my alphabet represent a letter from the latin alphabet. I'm writing in 3 languages, only I know which languages. Grammar is the one from my ...
sliders_alpha's user avatar
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How to break homophonic substitutions and nomenclators with too many symbols?

Early attempts to thwart frequency analysis attacks on ciphers involved using homophonic substitutions, i.e., some letters map to more than one ciphertext symbol. The earliest known example of this, ...
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What is the diffrence between Feistel networks and SPN?

I recently read about the concept of Feistel Networks and Substitution Permutation Networks but what is exactly the difference between the two ?
blacklight's user avatar
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Was the Enigma's double stepping mechanism intentional?

It's sometimes refered to as the double stepping anomaly, so was it just a design flaw or was it put in place deliberately?
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Strategy to crack a presumed substitution cipher

The ciphertext given is: ejitp spawa qleji taiul rtwll rflrl laoat wsqqj atgac kthls iraoa twlpl qjatw jufrh lhuts qataq itats aittk stqfj cae I've done ...
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Is this hand cipher any more secure than the Vigenère cipher?

I know that inventing one's one crypto always sucks, but the problem is that hand ciphers are usually very insecure very slow. This is an attempt to make a relatively secure, keyable, and modular ...
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Can I make a cipher (ex: Vigenère) harder to break?

The Vigenère cipher can relatively easy be broken when the key size is small compared to the size of the message. One first finds the length of the key, and then uses frequency analysis to actually ...
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Can a monoalphabetic substitution cipher attain perfect secrecy?

Can a monoalphabetic substitution cipher attain perfect secrecy? Definition of perfect secrecy: $${\rm Pr}[\,{\rm Enc}_k(m_1) = c\,] = {\rm Pr}[\,{\rm Enc}_k(m_2) = c\,]$$
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Mathematical structure for Sbox

Recently, when I studied the permutation cipher, I saw a matrices structure which is same as permutation cipher. This method was so simple and interesting for me. Let $m$ be $n$-bit plain text and $P=...
Meysam Ghahramani's user avatar
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What methods allow us to determine the language used in a monoalphabetic substitution cipher?

Working on a cipher (which I assume to be a mono-alphabetic substitution cipher due to the letter frequency) I struggle with the fact that I don't know which language the plain text is written in. ...
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Cryptanalysis in the middle ages -- publications

Are there any publications, articles or literature discussing cryptanalysis and crypt breaking techniques in the middle-ages? I have seen various manuals from the middle ages describing various types ...
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Will compression help defeat single letter frequency attack against a mono alphabetic substitution cipher?

Alice has a long message to send. She is using mono alphabetic substitution cipher. She thinks that if she compresses the message it may protect the text from single letter frequency attack by Eve. ...
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Are specially designed fonts sometimes used in cryptography?

As a font designer, I was thinking that it would be very easy to design a special font that could either jumble characters of a language (or of a code) or simply (with the features offered by the OTF ...
MicroMachine's user avatar
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How to get the keyword from a keyword cipher?

I was given a ciphertext and now I am trying to break it via looking for the keyword. This is a keyword cipher. So: PlainEnglish: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ If ...
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Substitution ciphers amended with cipher block chaining: susceptible to frequency analysis?

I have been studying ways to amend a simple substitution cipher, and one of the toy suggestions was to use CBC in the following way: identify each letter with a number from $0\ldots 25$ start with a ...
sunsetgreen's user avatar
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2 answers
336 views

Which sub operation is more expensive in the AES encryption process?

In the AES encryption process, there are various sub-operations, like SubByte, MixColumns, ARK etc. My question is which of these operations is more expensive? In a video lecture by Dan Boneh, it is ...
Radium's user avatar
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Is frequency analysis a viable attack on non-text data encoded by substitution?

Is frequency analysis a viable attack on non-text data encoded by substitution (eg image and audio formats encoded with a substitution cipher)?
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How does an S-box introduce confusion

I'm trying to find the logic for introducing the S-box, but having trouble understanding why. In a simple cipher, e.g. c = pt xor key I understand that I can ...
Benjamin Larsen's user avatar
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1 answer
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Which cipher text is easiest to guess the plaintext?

I know that there are approximately 2^88 diff erent permutations of 26 characters. The stream cipher A5/1, which generates a binary keystream using three irregularly clocked LFSR, and has a 64-bit key....
M.J.Watson's user avatar
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Cracking the Beaufort cipher

Is there any easy way to crack a Beaufort cipher? We have a Vigenère table, and are trying to guess the keyword. Any easier way?
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How can one break a monoalphbetic substitution chipher at pseudorandom text?

Does anybody know how to break monoalphbetic substitution cipher, if it is applied to some pseudorandom text (for example to some surrogate key filed in a database)? Let us assume that we have only ...
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1 answer
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How to break a Quagmire 3 cipher?

What would be a good way to go about attacking a Quagmire 3 cipher? I understand that it is polyalphabetic with a key and an indicator. I have started by taking the cipher text, taking every n-th ...
OnyxDown's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
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Deciphering “easy” ciphers without hints

I've been keen on IT Security for a long time now and I've learned a lot about networking & security. However trying a "decryption challenge" I'm lacking what I think is basic encryption/...
UsuallyNot's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
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How would I make a secret notation alphabet more secure?

Disclaimer: I was looking for a place to ask this question on SE and this site seems to be the most fitting. If this question doesn't belong here, feel free to redirect me. Just out of boredom and ...
Jenny's user avatar
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Keys-space for a restricted substitution cipher

How can one calculate the key-space for a restricted substitution cipher? A restricted substitution cipher is one where no letter is assigned to itself. For an alphabet with 26 letters how many keys ...
Rai's user avatar
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How to attack polyalphabetic affine cipher with only ciphertext?

How to attack polyalphabetic affine cipher with only the ciphertext? A polyalphabetic affine cipher can be seen as the composition of an affine cipher ($p \mapsto c \equiv a \times p + b \pmod{26})$ ...
Retikulum's user avatar
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Research for video game: Novice cryptography concepts [closed]

I'm making a video game which has some basic cryptography as a main base for puzzle design. I'm hoping players will get great puzzle challenge and learn a few cryptography concepts through playing the ...
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