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In classical cryptography, the bifid cipher is a cipher which combines the Polybius square with transposition, and uses fractionation to achieve diffusion. It was invented around 1901 by Felix Delastelle.
First, a mixed alphabet Polybius square is drawn up, where the I and the J share their position:
1 2 3 4 5 1 B G W K Z 2 Q P N D S 3 I O A X E 4 F C L U M 5 T H Y V R
The message is converted to its coordinates in the usual manner, but they are written vertically beneath:
F L E E A T O N C E 4 4 3 3 3 5 3 2 4 3 1 3 5 5 3 1 2 3 2 5
They are then read out in rows:
4 4 3 3 3 5 3 2 4 3 1 3 5 5 3 1 2 3 2 5
Then divided up into pairs again, and the pairs turned back into letters using the square:
44 33 35 32 43 13 55 31 23 25 U A E O L W R I N S
In this way, each ciphertext character depends on two plaintext characters, so the bifid is a digraphic cipher, like the Playfair cipher. To decrypt, the procedure is simply reversed.
Longer messages are first broken up into blocks of fixed length, called the period, and the above encryption procedure is applied to each block. One way to detect the period uses bigram statistics on ciphertext letters separated by half the period. For even periods, p, as in the example above (p=10), ciphertext letters at a distance of p/2 are influenced by two plaintext letters (e. g., U and W are influenced by F and T), but for odd periods, p, ciphertext letters at distances of p/2 (rounded either up or down) are influenced by three plaintext letters. Thus, odd periods are more secure than even against this form of cryptanalysis, because it would require more text to find a statistical anomaly in trigram plaintext statistics than bigram plaintext statistics. [1]
Cryptanalysis refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic security systems and gain access to the contents of encrypted messages, even if the cryptographic key is unknown.
In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encrypting in which units of plaintext are replaced with the ciphertext, in a defined manner, with the help of a key; the "units" may be single letters, pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth. The receiver deciphers the text by performing the inverse substitution process to extract the original message.
In cryptography, a transposition cipher is a method of encryption which scrambles the positions of characters (transposition) without changing the characters themselves. Transposition ciphers reorder units of plaintext according to a regular system to produce a ciphertext which is a permutation of the plaintext. They differ from substitution ciphers, which do not change the position of units of plaintext but instead change the units themselves. Despite the difference between transposition and substitution operations, they are often combined, as in historical ciphers like the ADFGVX cipher or complex high-quality encryption methods like the modern Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
A stream cipher is a symmetric key cipher where plaintext digits are combined with a pseudorandom cipher digit stream (keystream). In a stream cipher, each plaintext digit is encrypted one at a time with the corresponding digit of the keystream, to give a digit of the ciphertext stream. Since encryption of each digit is dependent on the current state of the cipher, it is also known as state cipher. In practice, a digit is typically a bit and the combining operation is an exclusive-or (XOR).
The Vigenère cipher is a method of encrypting alphabetic text where each letter of the plaintext is encoded with a different Caesar cipher, whose increment is determined by the corresponding letter of another text, the key.
An autokey cipher is a cipher that incorporates the message into the key. The key is generated from the message in some automated fashion, sometimes by selecting certain letters from the text or, more commonly, by adding a short primer key to the front of the message.
In cryptanalysis, frequency analysis is the study of the frequency of letters or groups of letters in a ciphertext. The method is used as an aid to breaking classical ciphers.
The Playfair cipher or Playfair square or Wheatstone–Playfair cipher is a manual symmetric encryption technique and was the first literal digram substitution cipher. The scheme was invented in 1854 by Charles Wheatstone, but bears the name of Lord Playfair for promoting its use.
In cryptography, ciphertext or cyphertext is the result of encryption performed on plaintext using an algorithm, called a cipher. Ciphertext is also known as encrypted or encoded information because it contains a form of the original plaintext that is unreadable by a human or computer without the proper cipher to decrypt it. This process prevents the loss of sensitive information via hacking. Decryption, the inverse of encryption, is the process of turning ciphertext into readable plaintext. Ciphertext is not to be confused with codetext because the latter is a result of a code, not a cipher.
In cryptography, the ADFGVX cipher was a manually applied field cipher used by the Imperial German Army during World War I. It was used to transmit messages secretly using wireless telegraphy. ADFGVX was in fact an extension of an earlier cipher called ADFGX which was first used on 1 March 1918 on the German Western Front. ADFGVX was applied from 1 June 1918 on both the Western Front and Eastern Front.
The Polybius square, also known as the Polybius checkerboard, is a device invented by the ancient Greeks Cleoxenus and Democleitus, and made famous by the historian and scholar Polybius. The device is used for fractionating plaintext characters so that they can be represented by a smaller set of symbols, which is useful for telegraphy, steganography, and cryptography. The device was originally used for fire signalling, allowing for the coded transmission of any message, not just a finite number of predetermined options as was the convention before.
In cryptography, a classical cipher is a type of cipher that was used historically but for the most part, has fallen into disuse. In contrast to modern cryptographic algorithms, most classical ciphers can be practically computed and solved by hand. However, they are also usually very simple to break with modern technology. The term includes the simple systems used since Greek and Roman times, the elaborate Renaissance ciphers, World War II cryptography such as the Enigma machine and beyond.
In classical cryptography, the Hill cipher is a polygraphic substitution cipher based on linear algebra. Invented by Lester S. Hill in 1929, it was the first polygraphic cipher in which it was practical to operate on more than three symbols at once.
The trifid cipher is a classical cipher invented by Félix Delastelle and described in 1902. Extending the principles of Delastelle's earlier bifid cipher, it combines the techniques of fractionation and transposition to achieve a certain amount of confusion and diffusion: each letter of the ciphertext depends on three letters of the plaintext and up to three letters of the key.
The four-square cipher is a manual symmetric encryption technique. It was invented by the French cryptographer Felix Delastelle.
Félix-Marie Delastelle was a French cryptographer, best known for inventing the bifid cipher, first presented in the Revue du Génie civil in 1895 under the name of "cryptographie nouvelle". This cipher combines fractionation with transposition, and was an early cipher to implement the principles of confusion and diffusion. David Kahn described it as a "system of considerable importance in cryptology."
The Two-square cipher, also called double Playfair, is a manual symmetric encryption technique. It was developed to ease the cumbersome nature of the large encryption/decryption matrix used in the four-square cipher while still being slightly stronger than the single-square Playfair cipher.
In the history of cryptography, the Nihilist cipher is a manually operated symmetric encryption cipher, originally used by Russian Nihilists in the 1880s to organize terrorism against the tsarist regime. The term is sometimes extended to several improved algorithms used much later for communication by the First Chief Directorate with its spies.
In the history of cryptography, a grille cipher was a technique for encrypting a plaintext by writing it onto a sheet of paper through a pierced sheet. The earliest known description is due to the polymath Girolamo Cardano in 1550. His proposal was for a rectangular stencil allowing single letters, syllables, or words to be written, then later read, through its various apertures. The written fragments of the plaintext could be further disguised by filling the gaps between the fragments with anodyne words or letters. This variant is also an example of steganography, as are many of the grille ciphers.
The Alberti Cipher, created in 1467 by Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti, was one of the first polyalphabetic ciphers. In the opening pages of his treatise De componendis cifris he explained how his conversation with the papal secretary Leonardo Dati about a recently developed movable type printing press led to the development of his cipher wheel.
