UNIT – I – Part-III

Syllabus: Cryptography: Concepts and Techniques: Introduction, plain text and cipher
text, substitution techniques, transposition techniques, encryption and decryption, symmetric
and asymmetric key cryptography, stenography, key range and key size, possible types of
attacks
Cryptography: Concepts and Techniques
Some basic terminologies used
1. CIPHER TEXT - the coded message
2. CIPHER - algorithm for transforming plaintext to cipher text
3. KEY - info used in cipher known only to sender/receiver
4. ENCIPHER (ENCRYPT) - converting plaintext to cipher text
5. ECIPHER (DECRYPT) - recovering cipher text from plaintext
6. CRYPTOGRAPHY - study of encryption principles/methods
7. CRYPTANALYSIS (CODE BREAKING) - the study of principles/ methods of
deciphering cipher text without knowing key
8. CRYPTOLOGY - the field of both cryptography and cryptanalysis
Cryptography
Cryptographic systems are generally classified along 3 independent dimensions:
 Type of operations used for transforming plain text to cipher text:
All the encryption algorithms are a based on two general principles: substitution, in
which each element in the plaintext is mapped into another element, and
transposition, in which elements in the plaintext are rearranged.
 The number of keys used
If the sender and receiver uses same key then it is s to be symmetric key (or) single
key (or) conventional encryption. If the sender and receiver use different keys then it
is saidto be public key encryption.
 The way in which the plain text is processed:
A block cipher processes the input and block of elements at a time, producing output
block for each input block. A Stream cipher processes the input elements
continuously, producing output element one at a time, as it goes along.
Cryptanalysis
The process of attempting to discover X or K or both is known as cryptanalysis. The strategy
used by the cryptanalysis depends on the nature of the encryption scheme and the information
available to the cryptanalyst. There are various types of cryptanalytic attacks based on the
amount of information known to the cryptanalyst.
 Cipher text only – A copy of cipher text alone is known to the cryptanalyst.
 Known plaintext – The cryptanalyst has a copy of the cipher text and the
corresponding plaintext.
 Chosen plaintext – The cryptanalysts gains temporary access to the encryption
machine. They cannot open it to find the key, however; they can encrypt a large
number of suitably chosen plaintexts and try to use the resulting cipher texts to deduce
the key.
 Chosen cipher text – The cryptanalyst obtains temporary access to the decryption
machine, uses it to decrypt several string of symbols, and tries to use the results to
deduce the key.
Classical Encryption Techniques
There are two basic building blocks of all encryption techniques: substitution and
transposition.
Substitution Techniques
In which each element in the plaintext is mapped into another element.

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1. Caesar Cipher
2. Monoalphabetic cipher
3. Playfair Cipher
4. Hill Cipher
5. Polyalphabetic Cipher
6. One Time Pad
Caesar Cipher
It is a mono-alphabetic cipher wherein each letter of the plaintext is substituted by another
letter to form the cipher text. It is a simplest form of substitution cipher scheme.
This cryptosystem is generally referred to as the Shift Cipher. The concept is to replace
eachalphabet by another alphabet which is ‘shifted’ by some fixed number between 0
and 25.
For this type of scheme, both sender and receiver agree on a ‘secret shift number’ for shifting
the alphabet. This number which is between 0 and 25 becomes the key of encryption.
The name ‘Caesar Cipher’ is occasionally used to describe the Shift Cipher when the ‘shift of
three’ is used.
Process of Shift Cipher
• In order to encrypt a plaintext letter, the sender positions the sliding ruler underneath
the first set of plaintext letters and slides it to LEFT by the number of positions of the secret
shift.
• The plaintext letter is then encrypted to the cipher text letter on the sliding ruler
underneath. The result of this process is depicted in the following illustration for an agreed
shift of three positions. In this case, the plaintext ‘tutorial’ is encrypted to the cipher text
‘WXWRULDO’. Here is the cipher text alphabet for a Shift of 3 –

• On receiving the cipher text, the receiver who also knows the secret shift, positions his
sliding ruler underneath the cipher text alphabet and slides it to RIGHT by the agreed shift
number, 3 in this case.
• He then replaces the cipher text letter by the plaintext letter on the sliding ruler
underneath. Hence the cipher text ‘WXWRULDO’ is decrypted to ‘tutorial’. To decrypt a
message encoded with a Shift of 3, generate the plaintext alphabet using a shift of ‘-3’ as
shown below –

Security Value
Caesar Cipher is not a secure cryptosystem because there are only 26 possible keys to try out.
An attacker can carry out an exhaustive key search with available limited computing
resources.
Simple Substitution Cipher
It is an improvement to the Caesar Cipher. Instead of shifting the alphabets by some number,
this scheme uses some permutation of the letters in alphabet.
For example, A.B…..Y.Z and Z.Y……B.A are two obvious permutation of all the letters in
alphabet. Permutation is nothing but a jumbled up set of alphabets.
With 26 letters in alphabet, the possible permutations are 26! (Factorial of 26) which is equal
to 4x1026. The sender and the receiver may choose any one of these possible permutation as a

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cipher text alphabet. This permutation is the secret key of the scheme.
Process of Simple Substitution Cipher
 Write the alphabets A, B, C,...,Z in the natural order.
 The sender and the receiver decide on a randomly selected permutation of the
lettersof the alphabet.
 Underneath the natural order alphabets, write out the chosen permutation of the
lettersof the alphabet. For encryption, sender replaces each plaintext letters by
substituting the permutation letter that is directly beneath it in the table. This
process is shown in the following illustration. In this example, the chosen
permutation is K, D, G, O. The plaintext ‘point’ is encrypted to ‘MJBXZ’.
Here is a jumbled Cipher text alphabet, where the order of the cipher text letters is
a key.

 On receiving the ciphertext, the receiver, who also knows the randomly chosen
permutation, replaces each ciphertext letter on the bottom row with the
corresponding plaintext letter in the top row. The ciphertext ‘MJBXZ’ is decrypted
to ‘point’.
Security Value
Simple Substitution Cipher is a considerable improvement over the Caesar Cipher. The
possible number of keys is large (26!) and even the modern computing systems are not
yet powerful enough to comfortably launch a brute force attack to break the system.
However, the Simple Substitution Cipher has a simple design and it is prone to design
flaws, say choosing obvious permutation, this cryptosystem can be easily broken.
Monoalphabetic and Polyalphabetic Cipher
Monoalphabetic cipher is a substitution cipher in which for a given key, the cipher
alphabet for each plain alphabet is fixed throughout the encryption process. For
example, if ‘A’ is encrypted as ‘D’, for any number of occurrence in that plaintext, ‘A’
will always get encrypted to ‘D’.
All of the substitution ciphers we have discussed earlier in this chapter are
monoalphabetic; these ciphers are highly susceptible to cryptanalysis.
Polyalphabetic Cipher is a substitution cipher in which the cipher alphabet for the plain
alphabet may be different at different places during the encryption process. The next
two examples, playfair and Vigenere Cipher are polyalphabetic ciphers.
Playfair Cipher
In this scheme, pairs of letters are encrypted, instead of single letters as in the case of
simple substitution cipher.
In playfair cipher, initially a key table is created. The key table is a 5×5 grid of
alphabets that acts as the key for encrypting the plaintext. Each of the 25 alphabets
must be unique and one letter of the alphabet (usually J) is omitted from the table as
we need only 25 alphabets instead of 26. If the plaintext contains J, then it is replaced
by I.
The sender and the receiver deicide on a particular key, say ‘tutorials’. In a key table, the
first characters (going left to right) in the table is the phrase, excluding the duplicate
letters. The rest of the table will be filled with the remaining letters of the alphabet, in
natural order. The key table works out to be −

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 UNIT – I – Part-III

Process of Playfair Cipher

 First, a plaintext message is split into pairs of two letters (digraphs). If there is
an odd number of letters, a Z is added to the last letter. Let us say we want to
encryptthe message “hide money”. It will be written as −
HI DE MO NE YZ
 The rules of encryption are −
o If both the letters are in the same column, take the letter below each one
(going back to the top if at the bottom)

T U OR I
A L S B C ‘H’ and ‘I’ are in same column, hence take letter below them to
D E F G H replace.HI → QC
K M NP Q
V W XY Z
 If both letters are in the same row, take the letter to the right of each one (going
backto the left if at the farthest right)
T U OR I
A L S B C ‘D’ and ‘E’ are in same row, hence take letter to the right of them to
D E F G H replace. DE → EF
K M NP Q
V W XY Z
 If neither of the preceding two rules are true, form a rectangle with the two
letters andtake the letters on the horizontal opposite corner of the rectangle.

Using these rules, the result of the encryption of ‘hide money’ with the key of ‘tutorials’
would be −
QC EF NU MF ZV
Decrypting the Playfair cipher is as simple as doing the same process in reverse.
Receiver hasthe same key and can create the same key table, and then decrypt any

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messages made using that key.

Security Value
It is also a substitution cipher and is difficult to break compared to the simple
substitution cipher. As in case of substitution cipher, cryptanalysis is possible on the
Playfair cipher as well, however it would be against 625 possible pairs of letters (25x25
alphabets) instead of 26different possible alphabets.
The Playfair cipher was used mainly to protect important, yet non-critical secrets, as it
is quick to use and requires no special equipment.
Vigenere Cipher
This scheme of cipher uses a text string (say, a word) as a key, which is then used for
doing a number of shifts on the plaintext.
For example, let’s assume the key is ‘point’. Each alphabet of the key is converted to its
respective numeric value: In this case,
p → 16, o → 15, i → 9, n → 14, and t → 20.
Thus, the key is: 16 15 9 14 20.
Process of Vigenere Cipher
 The sender and the receiver decide on a key. Say ‘point’ is the key. Numeric
representation of this key is ‘16 15 9 14 20’.
 The sender wants to encrypt the message, say ‘attack from south east’. He will
arrange plaintext and numeric key as follows –





 He now shifts each plaintext alphabet by the number written
below it to createciphertext as shown below −






 Here, each plaintext character has been shifted by a different amount – and that
amount is determined by the key. The key must be less than or equal to the size
ofthe message.
 For decryption, the receiver uses the same key and shifts received ciphertext in
reverse order to obtain the plaintext.
Security Value
Vigenere Cipher was designed by tweaking the standard Caesar cipher to reduce the
effectiveness of cryptanalysis on the ciphertext and make a cryptosystem more robust. It
is significantly more secure than a regular Caesar Cipher.
In the history, it was regularly used for protecting sensitive political and military
information. It was referred to as the unbreakable cipher due to the difficulty it posed
to the cryptanalysis.
Variants of Vigenere Cipher
There are two special cases of Vigenere cipher −
 The keyword length is same as plaintext message. This case is called Vernam
Cipher. It is more secure than typical Vigenere cipher.
 Vigenere cipher becomes a cryptosystem with perfect secrecy, which is called
One-time pad.

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One-Time Pad
The circumstances are −
 The length of the keyword is same as the length of the plaintext.
 The keyword is a randomly generated string of alphabets.
 The keyword is used only once.
Security Value
Let us compare Shift cipher with one-time pad.
Shift Cipher − Easy to Break
In case of Shift cipher, the entire message could have had a shift between 1
and 25. This is a very small size, and very easy to brute force. However, with
each character now having its own individual shift between 1 and 26, the
possible keys grow exponentially for the message.
One-time Pad − Impossible to Break
Let us say, we encrypt the name “point” with a one-time pad. It is a 5 letter
text. To break the cipher text by brute force, you need to try all possibilities
of keys and conduct computation for (26 x 26 x 26 x 26 x 26) = 265 =
11881376 times. That’s for a message with 5 alphabets. Thus, for a longer
message, the computation grows exponentially with every additional
alphabet. This makes it computationally impossible to break the cipher text
by brute force.
Transposition Techniques
All the techniques examined so far involve the substitution of a cipher text
symbol for a plaintext symbol. A very different kind of mapping is achieved
by performing some sort of permutation on the plaintext letters. This
technique is referred to as a transposition cipher.
Rail fence is simplest of such cipher, in which the plaintext is written down
as a sequence of diagonals and then read off as a sequence of rows.
Plaintext = meet at the school house
To encipher this message with a rail fence of depth 2,
We write the message as follows:
m E a t E c o l o s
e T t h S h o h u e
The encrypted message is meatecolosetthshohue
Row Transposition Ciphers-A more complex scheme is to write the
message in a rectangle, row by row, and read the message off, column by
column, but permute the order of the columns. The order of columns then
becomes the key of the algorithm.
e.g., plaintext = meet at the school house
Key = 4 3 1 2 5 6 7
PT = m e e t a t t h e s c h o o l h o u s e
CT = esotcueehmhlahstoeto
A pure transposition cipher is easily recognized because it has the same letter frequencies as
the original plaintext. The transposition cipher can be made significantly more secure by
performing more than one stage of transposition. The result is more complex permutation that
is not easily reconstructed.
Steganography
A plaintext message may be hidden in any one of the two ways. The methods of
steganography conceal the existence of the message, whereas the methods of cryptography
render the message unintelligible to outsiders by various transformations of the text. A simple

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form of steganography, but one that is time consuming to construct is one in which an
arrangement of words or letters within an apparently innocuous text spells out the real
message. e.g., (i) the sequence of first letters of each word of the overall message spells out
the real (hidden) message. (ii) Subset of the words of the overall message is used to convey
the hidden message. Various other techniques have been used historically, some of them are:
 Character marking – selected letters of printed or typewritten text are overwritten in
pencil. The marks are ordinarily not visible unless the paper is held to an angle to
bright light.
 Invisible ink – a number of substances can be used for writing but leave no visible
trace until heat or some chemical is applied to the paper.
 Pin punctures – small pin punctures on selected letters are ordinarily not visible unless
the paper is held in front of the light.
 Typewritten correction ribbon – used between the lines typed with a black ribbon, the
results of typing with the correction tape are visible only under a strong light.
Drawbacks of Steganography
o Requires a lot of overhead to hide a relatively few bits of information.
o Once the system is discovered, it becomes virtually worthless.
Key range and Key size
 The concept of key range and key-size are related to each other. Key Range is total
number of keys from smallest to largest available key. An attacker usually is armed
with the knowledge of the cryptographic algorithm and the encrypted message, so
only the actual key value remains the challenge for the attacker.
 If the key is found, the attacker can get original plaintext message. In the brute force
attack, every possible key in the key-range is tried, until we get the right key.
 In the best case, the right key is found in the first attempt, in the worst case, the key is
found in the last attempt. On an average, the right key is found after trying half of the
possible keys in the key-range. Therefore by expanding the key range to a large
extent, longer it will take for an attacker to find the key using brute-force attack.
 The concept of key range leads to the principle of key size. The strength of a
cryptographic key is measured with the key size.
 Key size is measured in bits and is represented using binary number system. Thus if
the key range from 0 to 8, then the key size is 3 bits or in other words we can say if
the size is bits then the key range is 0 to 256. Key size may be varying, depending
upon the applications and the cryptographic algorithm being used, it can be 40 bits, 56
bits, 128 bits & so on. In order to protect the cipher-text against the brute-force attack,
the key-size should be such that the attacker cannot crack it within a specified amount
of time.
 From a practical viewpoint, a 40-bit key takes about 3 hours to crack, however a 41-
bit key would take 6 hours and 42-bit key would take 12 hours & so on. This means
every additional bit doubles the amount of time required to crack the key. We can
assume that 128 bit key is quite safe, considering the capabilities of today’s
computers. However as the computing power and techniques improve, these numbers
will change in future.

Dr. Ram Prasad Reddy Sadi Page 7