scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1112449

MaRDI QIDQ4374072zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Ben Johnsen

Publication date 4 November 1998

zbMATH Keywords

classical cryptosystemsubstitution ciphers

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

History of information and communication theory (94-03) Cryptography (94A60)

Review text

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.

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Cited in

(8)

• How we broke the union code (148 years too late)
• Vernam, Mauborgne, and Friedman: the one-time pad and the index of coincidence
• Claude E. Shannon: toys, life and the secret history of his theory of information.
• Steps toward unraveling a Vatican cipher of the 1930s
• The Zodiac killer ciphers
• ``I shall love you until death (Marie-Antoinette to Axel von Fersen)
• Cicco Simonetta's Cipher-Breaking Rules
• The perfect cipher

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