Friday, January 12, 2007

Keyword cipher

The Keyword cipher is identical to the Caesar Cipher with the exception that the substitution alphabet used can be represented with a keyword.
To create a substitution alphabet from a keyword, you first write down the alphabet. Below this you write down the keyword (omitting duplicate letters) followed by the remaining unused letters of the alphabet.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
KEYWORDABCFGHIJLMNPQSTUVXZ

To encipher a plaintext message, you convert all letters from the top row to their correspondng letter on the
bottom row (A to K, B to E, etc).
These types of simple substitution ciphers can be easily cracked by using frequency analysis and some educated guessing.

Plaintext: this is a secret message
Ciphertext: qabp bp k poynoq hoppkdo

No comments: