CLASSICAL CIPHERS

By
Mr. Fasee Ullah
CUSIT
Peshawar
Agenda
 Types of classical ciphers
 Asymmetric cryptography
 Application of Asymmetric encryption
Symmetric Cipher Model
 A symmetric encryption scheme has five ingredients
 Plaintext: This is the original message or data
 Encryption algorithm: The encryption algorithm performs
various substitutions and transformations on the plaintext
 Secret key: The secret key is also input to the encryption
algorithm
 The algorithm will produce a different output depending
on the specific key being used at the time
 The exact substitutions and transformations performed by
the algorithm depend on the key
 Contd…
 Ciphertext: This is the scrambled message
produced as output
 It depends on the plaintext and the secret key and,
as it stands, is unintelligible
 Decryption algorithm: This is essentially the
encryption algorithm run in reverse
 It takes the ciphertext and the secret key and
produces the original plaintext
Classical Substitution Ciphers
 Substitution techniques use classical encryption
technique
 A study of these techniques enables us to explain the
basic approaches to symmetric encryption used today
 Two basic block of encryption techniques are
 substitution
 Transposition
 A substitution technique is one in which the letters of
plaintext are replaced by other letters or by numbers or
symbols
Caesar Cipher
 earliest known substitution cipher
 by Julius Caesar
 first attested use in military affairs
 replaces each letter by 3rd letter on

 meet me after the toga party

Caesar Cipher
example:
Plain text: meet me after the toga party
Cipher Text: PHHW PH DIWHU WKH WRJD
SDUWB

 Note: Plaintext always in lowercase;

 ciphertext is in uppercase;
 key values are in lowercase
Caesar Cipher
 can define transformation as:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
DE FGHI JKLM NOPQR STUVWXYZAB C
 mathematically give each letter a number
abcdefghij k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

 then have Caesar cipher as:

c = E(p) = (p + k) mod (26)
p = D(c) = (c – k) mod (26)
Cryptanalysis of Caesar Cipher
 only have 26 possible ciphers
 A maps to A,B,..Z
 could simply try each in turn
 a brute force search
 given ciphertext, just try all shifts of letters
 do need to recognize when have plaintext
 eg. break ciphertext "GCUA VQ DTGCM"
Monoalphabetic Cipher
 rather than just shifting the alphabet
 could shuffle (jumble) the letters arbitrarily
 each plaintext letter maps to a different random
ciphertext letter
 hence key is 26 letters long

Plain: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Cipher: DKVQFIBJWPESCXHTMYAUOLRGZN

Plaintext: ifwewishtoreplaceletters
Ciphertext: WIRFRWAJUHYFTSDVFSFUUFYA
Monoalphabetic Cipher Security
 now have a total of 26! = 4 x 1026 keys
 with so many keys, might think is secure to
eliminate brute-force techniques
 but would be !!!WRONG!!!
 problem is language characteristics
Language Redundancy and Cryptanalysis

 human languages are redundant

 eg "th lrd s m shphrd shll nt wnt"
 letters are not equally commonly used
 in English E is by far the most common letter
 followed by T,R,N,I,O,A,S
 other letters like Z,J,K,Q,X are fairly rare
 have tables of single, double & triple letter
frequencies for various languages
English Letter Frequencies
Relative Frequencies of letters in ciphertext

P 13.33 H 5.83 F 3.33 B 1.67 C 0.00

Z 11.67 D 5.00 W 3.33 G 1.67 K 0.00

S 8.33 E 5.00 Q 2.50 Y 1.67 L 0.00

U 8.33 V 4.17 T 2.50 I 0.83 N 0.00

O 7.50 X 4.17 A 1.67 J 0.83 R 0.00

M 6.67      
Example Cryptanalysis
 given ciphertext:
UZQSOVUOHXMOPVGPOZPEVSGZWSZOPFPESXUDBMETSXAIZ
VUEPHZHMDZSHZOWSFPAPPDTSVPQUZWYMXUZUHSX
EPYEPOPDZSZUFPOMBZWPFUPZHMDJUDTMOHMQ
 count relative letter frequencies
 guess P & Z are e and t
 guess ZW is th and hence ZWP is the
 proceeding with trial and error finally get:
it was disclosed yesterday that several informal but
direct contacts have been made with political
representatives of the viet cong in moscow
Playfair Cipher
 not even the large number of keys in a
monoalphabetic cipher provides security
 one approach to improving security was to encrypt
multiple letters
 the Playfair Cipher is an example
 invented by Charles Wheatstone in 1854, but
named after his friend Baron Playfair
Playfair Key Matrix
 a 5X5 matrix of letters based on a keyword
 fill in letters of keyword
 fill rest of matrix with other letters
 eg. using the keyword MONARCHY
M O N A R
C H Y B D
E F G I/J K
L P Q S T
U V W X Z
Encrypting and Decrypting
plaintext is encrypted two letters at a time
 wrap from right side back to left, or from bottom back to

top.
1. if a pair is a repeated letter, insert a filler like 'X', eg.
"balloon" encrypts as "ba lx lo on"
2. if both letters fall in the same row, replace each with letter
to right eg. “ar" encrypts as "RM"
3. if both letters fall in the same column, replace each with
the letter below it (again wrapping to top from bottom), eg.
“mu" encrypts to "CM"
4. otherwise each letter is replaced by the one in its row in the
column of the other letter of the pair, eg. “hs" encrypts to
"BP", and “ea" to "IM" or "JM" (as desired)
Security of Playfair Cipher
 security much improved over monoalphabetic
 since have 26 x 26 = 676 digrams
 was widely used for many years
 eg. by US & British military in WW1
Polyalphabetic Ciphers
 polyalphabetic substitution ciphers
 improve security using multiple cipher

alphabets
 make cryptanalysis harder with more

alphabets to guess
 use a key to select which alphabet is used for

each letter of the message

 repeat from start after end of key is reached
Vigenère Cipher
 simplest polyalphabetic substitution cipher
 key is multiple letters long K = k1 k2 ...
 ith letter specifies ith alphabet to use
 use each alphabet in turn
Example of Vigenère Cipher
 write the plaintext out
 write the keyword repeated above it
 eg using keyword deceptive
key: deceptivedeceptivedeceptive
plaintext: wearediscoveredsaveyourself
ciphertext:ZICVTWQNGRZGVTWAVZHCQYGLMGJ
Security of Vigenère Ciphers
 have multiple ciphertext letters for each plaintext
letter
 hence letter frequencies are obscured
 but not totally lost
One-Time Pad
 Each new message requires a new key of the same length as the new
message
 Such a technique called One Time Pad

 is unbreakable since ciphertext bears no statistical relationship to the

plaintext
 can only use the key once though

 The one-time pad offers complete security but, in practice, has two

fundamental difficulties:
1. There is the practical problem of making large quantities of random keys

2. And the problem of key distribution and protection, where for every
message to be sent, a key of equal length is needed by both sender and
receiver
Transposition Ciphers
 now consider classical transposition or
permutation ciphers
 these hide the message by rearranging the letter
order
 without altering the actual letters used
Rail Fence cipher
 write message letters out diagonally over a number of
rows
 then read off cipher row by row
 eg. write message out as:
m e m a t r h t g p r y
e t e f e t e o a a t
 giving ciphertext
MEMATRHTGPRYETEFETEOAAT
Row Transposition Ciphers
 a more complex transposition
 write letters of message out in rows over a
specified number of columns
 then reorder the columns according to some key
before reading off the rows
Key: 3421567
Plaintext: a t t a c k p
ostpone
duntilt
woamxyz
Ciphertext: TTNAAPTMTSUOAODWCOIXKNLYPETZ
Product Ciphers
 ciphers using substitutions or transpositions are not
secure because of language characteristics
 hence consider using several ciphers in succession to
make harder, but:
 two substitutions make a more complex substitution
 two transpositions make more complex transposition
 but a substitution followed by a transposition makes a new
much harder cipher
 this is bridge from classical to modern ciphers
Rotor Machines
 before modern ciphers, rotor machines were most
common complex ciphers in use
 widely used in WW2
 German Enigma, Allied Hagelin, Japanese Purple
 implemented a very complex, varying
substitution cipher
 used a series of cylinders, each giving one

substitution, which rotated and changed after

each letter was encrypted
 with 3 cylinders have 26 3=17576 alphabets
An Example of Rotor Machine
Hagelin Rotor Machine
Steganography
 an alternative to encryption
 hides existence of message
 a message can be first encrypted and then hidden
using steganography
 has drawbacks
 high overhead to hide relatively few info bits
Summary
 have considered:
 classical cipher techniques and terminology
 monoalphabetic substitution ciphers
 cryptanalysis using letter frequencies
 Playfair cipher
 polyalphabetic ciphers
 transposition ciphers
 product ciphers and rotor machines
 stenography
Assignment 20/09/2010
 Explain each cipher with examples:
 Hill Cipher
 Kasiski cipher
 Autokey Cipher
 Application of Symmetric encryption