gibberish. A monoalphabetic cipher would also appear to be better than the Caesarcipher in that there are 26! (on the order of 1026) possible pairings of lettersratherthan 25 possible pairings. A brute-force approach of trying all 1026possiblepairings would require far too much work to be a feasible way of breaking theencryption algorithm and decoding the message. However, by statistical analysisof the plaintext language, for example, knowing that the letters eandtare the mostfrequently occurring letters in typical English text (accounting for 13 percent and 9percent of letter occurrences), and knowing that particular two- and three-letteroccurrences of letters appear quite often together (for example, “in,” “it,” “the,”“ion,” “ing,” and so forth) make it relatively easy to break this code. If the intruderhas some knowledge about the possible contents of the message, then it is even easier to break the code. For example, if Trudy the intruder is Bob’s wife and suspectsBob of having an affair with Alice, then she might suspect that the names “bob”and “alice” appear in the text. If Trudy knew for certain that those two namesappeared in the ciphertext and had a copy of the example ciphertext messageabove, then she could immediately determine seven of the 26 letter pairings,requiring 109fewer possibilities to be checked by a brute-force method. Indeed, ifTrudy suspected Bob of having an affair, she might well expect to find some other
choice words in the message as well.
When considering how easy it might be for Trudy to break Bob and Alice’s
encryption scheme, one can distinguish three different scenarios, depending on what
information the intruder has.
• Ciphertext-only attack.In some cases, the intruder may have access only to the
intercepted ciphertext, with no certain information about the contents of the
plaintext message. We have seen how statistical analysis can help in a ciphertext-only attackon an encryption scheme.
• Known-plaintext attack.We saw above that if Trudy somehow knew for sure that
“bob” and “alice” appeared in the ciphertext message, then she could have determined the (plaintext, ciphertext) pairings for the letters a, l, i, c, e, b,ando.
Trudy might also have been fortunate enough to have recorded all of the ciphertext transmissions and then found Bob’s own decrypted version of one of the
transmissions scribbled on a piece of paper. When an intruder knows some of the
(plaintext, ciphertext) pairings, we refer to this as a known-plaintext attackon
the encryption scheme.
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