No label defined (Q4374072)

In his memoirs Casanova tells how he deciphered an encrypted manuscript. With this as the motivating starting point the author describes in an elementary way the classical monoalphabetic and polyalphabetic substitution ciphers as well as their analysis. The author shows how increasingly independent keystrings can make the ciphers harder to break until one eventually arrives at the unbreakable one time pad. Ideas from information theory due to Shannon are used to explain how redundancy in the cleartext and the dependencies in keystrings determine the unicity distance of the ciphers and explain when the expected number of false solutions increases exponentially with the length of the encrypted message.