No label defined (Q4239576)

In the paper use of combinatorial optimisation algorithms in the area of automated cryptanalysis is studied. Namely, simulated annealing and genetic algorithm approach are investigated together with a new attack that utilizes the tabu search. While some attacks on the simple substitution cipher using simulated annealing or a genetic algorithm were known previously, no comparison of the techniques were made. In the paper first each of these optimisation heuristics is described together with brief explanation of the tabu search technique. Then, attacks on the simple substitution cipher based on character frequency (\(n\)-gram) statistics are considered. For each of the techniques mentioned above a corresponding algorithm is described and the choice of suitable parameters is discussed. Then a number of experimental results is presented and used to compare performance of the three optimisation heuristics.