Sanjivani Rural Education Society’s

Sanjivani College of Engineering, Kopargaon-423 603

(An Autonomous Institute, Affiliated to Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune)
NACC ‘A’ Grade Accredited, ISO 9001:2015 Certified

Department of Computer Engineering

(NBA Accredited)

Lecture-02 Substitution Ciphers

 Substitution Techniques
• Substitution technique is a classical encryption technique where the
characters present in the original message are replaced by the other
characters or numbers or by symbols.
Substitution Technique:
1.Caesar Cipher
2.Modified Version of Caesar Cipher
3.Monoalphabetic Cipher
4.Homophonic Substitution Cipher
5.Polygram Substitution Cipher
6.Playfair Cipher
7.Hill Cipher

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 1. Caesar Cipher
 Caesar cipher
 Julius Caesar in 100 B.C
 Replace each letter l with (l +3) mod 26
 “Attack at dawn” Plain text becomes
 Dwwdfn dw gdzq Cipher Text

 Two components:
 Algorithm: Shift characters by a fixed amount
 Key: the fixed amount.
 Uniform Scheme of substitution
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 2. Modified Version of Caesar Cipher
 It cab be k place down the line this can increase complexity.
 Once replacement scheme is decided, it would be constant for
whole PT.
 25 possibilities of replacement.
 Brute force attack
 Solution: use multiple keys
 E.g. shift by (3,5,7)
 “Attack at dawn” becomes dya dhr dyk dbu
 Better, but frequency information still present.
 An attacker that knows the block size can separate out
characters encoded with different keys.
Attempt to Break Modified Caesar Cipher
Text Using All Possibilities
 3. Monoalphabetic Cipher

• Monoalphabetic cipher is a substitution cipher, where the

cipher alphabet for each plain text alphabet is fixed, for the
entire encryption.

• In simple words, if the alphabet ‘p’ in the plain text is

replaced by the cipher alphabet ‘d’. Then in the entire plain
text wherever alphabet ‘p’ is used, it will be replaced by the
alphabet ‘d’ to form the ciphertext.

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 4. Homophonic substitution cipher

 To escape frequency analysis, we can use a homophonic

substitution cipher

 Map symbols to multiple symbols.

 e.g 0 -> {01, 10}, 1->{00,11}
 Given Text 011010010 becomes: 011100101101011110
 Advantage: -Frequencies Hidden
 Disadvantage: -Message and Key are Longer
 5. Polygram Cipher
 All previous techniques are based on stream cipher.
 Polygram is a block cipher.
 Following figure shows it
 6. Playfair cipher
• In playfair cipher unlike traditional cipher we encrypt a pair
of alphabets(digraphs) instead of a single alphabet.
For the encryption process let us consider the following
example:
Key: monarchy
Plain Text: instruments
The Playfair Cipher Encryption Algorithm:
The Algorithm consists of 2 steps:
• Generate the key Square(5×5):
The key square 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 the table can hold only 25 alphabets). If the plaintext contains
J, then it is replaced by I.

• Algorithm to encrypt the plain text: The plaintext is split into

pairs of two letters (digraphs). If there is an odd number of
letters, a Z is added to the last letter.
Rules for Encryption:
• If both the letters are in the same column: Take the letter below each one
(going back to the top if at the bottom).
• If both the letters are in the same row: Take the letter to the right of each
one (going back to the leftmost if at the rightmost position).
• If neither of the above rules is true: Form a rectangle with the two letters
and take the letters on the horizontal opposite corner of the rectangle.
• Your cipher text is :gatlmzclrqtx
Playfair Encryption process
 7. Hill Cipher

• Hill cipher is a polyalphabetic cipher introduced by Lester Hill in

1929.
• Plain text: Binary
• Key: HILL
• Choose the key in such a way that it always forms a square matrix.
With HILL as the key, we can form a 2×2 matrix.
• Now, plaintext has to form a column vector of length similar to the
key matrix. In our case, the key matrix is 2×2 then the column
vectors of plain text would be 2×1.

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 Encryption Process

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The calculated ciphertext for ‘Binary’ using hill cipher is ‘TVNNZJ’.

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THANK YOU