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 some big project and it should be fairly simple to do. So, I am looking for an algorithm (doesnt have to be really fast) that is fairly simple.
I googled a bit and all the proposed algorithms like this answer to “Strategy to crack a presumed substitution cipher” are some genetic ones (i dont want to get into that) or some advanced (I mean not really basic) statistics (like here http://practicalcryptography.com/cryptanalysis/text-characterisation/quadgrams/#a-python-implementation and you need some other files).
Is there some reliable (I assume not so fast way) to crack the cipher with only the knowledge and use of the letter frequences and some list of the most lets say 10k or more english words?
I thought about it for a while and I cannot come up with a good way to make the function to rate the ciphertext (as is used in most of the algorithms). What would be a well-vetted cryptanalytic way to attack a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher algorithm?