Caesar cipher - Wikipedia.pdf

Caesar cipher 1 Caesar cipher The action of a Caesar cipher is to replace each plaintext letter with one fixed number of places down the alphabet. This example is with a shift of three, so that a B in the plaintext becomes E in the ciphertext. Detail Structure substitution cipher Best public cryptanalysis Susceptible to frequency analysis and brute force attacks. In cryptography, a Caesar cipher, also known as a Caesars cipher, the shift cipher, Caesars code or Caesar shift, is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. For example, with a shift of 3, A would be replaced by D, B would become E, and so on. The method is named after Julius Caesar, who used it to communicate with his generals. The encryption step performed by a Caesar cipher is often incorporated as part of more complex schemes, such as the Vigenère cipher, and still has modern application in the ROT13 system. As with all single alphabet substitution ciphers, the Caesar cipher is easily broken and in practice offers essentially no communication security. Example The transformation can be represented by aligning two alphabets; the cipher alphabet is the plain alphabet rotated left or right by some number of positions. For instance, here is a Caesar cipher using a left rotation of three places (the shift parameter, here 3, is used as the key): Plain: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Cipher: DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABC When encrypting, a person looks up each letter of the message in the plain line and writes down the corresponding letter in the cipher line. Deciphering is done in reverse. Ciphertext: WKH TXLFN EURZQ IRA MXPSV RYHU WKH ODCB GRJ Plaintext: the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog The encryption can also be represented using modular arithmetic by first transforming the letters into numbers, according to the scheme, A = 0,