Category: 5. Traditional Ciphers

Vigenere Cipher was designed by tweaking the standard Caesar cipher to reduce the effectiveness of cryptanalysis on the ciphertext and make a cryptosystem more robust. It is significantly more secure than a regular Caesar Cipher. In the history, it was regularly used for protecting sensitive political and military information. It was referred to as the unbreakable cipher due…

It is also a substitution cipher and is difficult to break compared to the simple substitution cipher. As in case of substitution cipher, cryptanalysis is possible on the Playfair cipher as well, however it would be against 625 possible pairs of letters (25×25 alphabets) instead of 26 different possible alphabets. The Playfair cipher was used…

In this scheme, pairs of letters are encrypted, instead of single letters as in the case of simple substitution cipher. In playfair cipher, initially a key table is created. The key table is a 5×5 grid of alphabets that acts as the key for encrypting the plaintext. Each of the 25 alphabets must be unique…

It is an improvement to the Caesar Cipher. Instead of shifting the alphabets by some number, this scheme uses some permutation of the letters in alphabet. For example, A.B…..Y.Z and Z.Y……B.A are two obvious permutation of all the letters in alphabet. Permutation is nothing but a jumbled up set of alphabets. With 26 letters in…

In the second chapter, we discussed the fundamentals of modern cryptography. We equated cryptography with a toolkit where various cryptographic techniques are considered as the basic tools. One of these tools is the Symmetric Key Encryption where the key used for encryption and decryption is the same. In this chapter, we discuss this technique further…