Cryptography Stack Exchange
Cryptography Stack Exchange

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.

The term substitution cipher is mostly used for historical ciphers, in contrast to transposition ciphers. Substitution ciphers working on a small alphabet (i.e. small units, like characters or pairs of characters) are susceptible to statistical attacks, and should not be used.

Modern block ciphers (when used in ECB mode) are in principle substitution ciphers whose units are the blocks. These effectively have an alphabet size of 2block-size.

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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 will probably get a 0% score on the quiz. So, I was…
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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 problems with it?
Arlen Beiler
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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 day key was encoded twice in the beginning of each…
user93
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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 the method of encryption appears to be quite…
pyko
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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 to be a viable option for a language such as…
davidlowryduda
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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 of 4 some other finalists (Twofish, MARS) are…
fgrieu
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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 is, is basically a substitution cipher where the…
Pichi Wuana
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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?
Shridhar R Kulkarni
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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 digrams/trigrams, because they will give you…
Pavancho Emiliano
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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 more links but google "enigma rotor details" and…
Givera Givera
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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 and exact edition number of the…
Polynomial
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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 $26!$. (I am considering an alphabet of 26…
shehan.k
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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 the name of the book, or the name of the cipher, so…
user2326
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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, -, _, =). The shuffled alphabet is, in essence, the…
Ten Bitcomb
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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 containing phone numbers, and need to anonymise all…
sumidid
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