Cryptanalysis of Substitution Ciphers
Lab Steps
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Description
Monoalphabetic ciphers are simple substitution ciphers where only one alphabet is used to substitute the characters from the plaintext and replace them one-for-one, where each character in the plaintext is always substituted with the same character in the ciphertext. This means that these ciphertexts are susceptible to frequency analysis.
Frequency analysis is a technique where a sample text is analysed to find out how often each character appears, which is used to build a histogram. This becomes the reference guide.
In this lab you will explore this by decrypting a classical cipher, the Caesar cipher.
This lab is part of a series on cyber network security.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:
-
Show how monoalphabetic ciphers are susceptible to frequency analysis
Intended Audience
This lab is intended for:
- Cyber and network security specialists
Prerequisites
You should possess:
- A basic understanding of Windows operating system environments
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