Q: If one strips down the English alphabet to only lower case letters.(eliminate
ID: 663925 • Letter: Q
Question
Q: If one strips down the English alphabet to only lower case letters.(eliminate capitalization, White space, and punctuation), then there are 26 different symbols ,aka letters. We know from combinatorics that there are 26 fractional possible distinct permutations of these 26 symbols, which, is approximately 3*1025 which is about 50 moles, which is approximately the number of water molecules in a glass of water. In other words, there are as many substitution ciphers is HUGE, and this would lead a naïve person to believe they are secure. Please try to explain why substitution ciphers are not secure.(And, Please be concise)
Explanation / Answer
Cipher: It is the steps for performing encryption and decryption.
Substitution Cipher: In this each character of plain text is converted into a special symbol. There are two types of substitution ciphers:
a) Monoalphabetic Substitution/ Simple Substitution
b) Polyalphabetic Substitution
In Simple substitution the characters of plain text are converted into special symbols or characters uniformly.Example: Caeser Cipher
In Polyalphabetic substitution the substitution are made depending on where in the plain text the character occurs. Example: Vigenere Cipher
Security:
The ecryption and decrytion are performed to make the data secure. But in substitution its just the cyclic shift of characters with uniformity which can be very easily decrypted without the key. There are only 26 alphabets which leads to redundancy of characters and makes it prominent how to decrypt it. Only the symbols are relabeled. Complete structure of plain text is intact to make the cryptanalyst task easier but it also makes the text vulnerable to easy decyption.
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