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3

How secure is this cipher? At first glance, not very. It would appear to be vulnerable to a ciphertext-only attack, for example, the attacker can recover the plaintext given a ciphertext of about 10k (actually, he probably can deal with less), even assuming that all the attacker initially knows is that the plaintext is "ASCII English", and he has no ...

6

First of all, we need to review what they mean by "parity of a permutation"; they don't mean whether the input block had a even number of 1's. Instead, they view the $n$ bit cipher (with a specific key) as a permutation on $2^n$ objects; that is, it can be review as a way of rearranging that set of $2^n$ objects onto itself. Now, permutations on a finite ...

4

This is purely a counting problem. We want the number $N(n,m)$ of possible permutations of $n$ things, with the constraint that only $m$ among these things can map to themselves ($0\le m\le n$). The values in the question are $n=11$, $m=5$. It holds that $N(n,n)=n!$ (that's the number of permutations of $n$ elements). It holds that ...

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