RUAHA CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND

COMMUNICATION
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Transposition Cipher
Techniques
Lecture Four

Dani Mfungo
Rail Fence Technique
• Enciphering
1. Write a plain text letters in a sequence of diagonals
2. Read off as a sequence of sequence of a sequence of rows
Example: Key = (depth) = (2)
P=“Meet me after the toga party”

M e m a t r h t g p r y
e t e f e t e o a a t
C= “MEMATRHTGPRYETEFETEOAAT”
Transposition Technique Cont…
• Trivial to cryptanalyst, a more complex scheme is to write the
plaintext in a rectangle, raw by raw, and read plaintext column by
column, but permute the order of the columns. Permuted column
numbers becomes a Key
• Example
P = “attack postponed until two am” and Key = 4312567


4 3 1 2 5 6 7
Key
A T T A C K P
Plaintext O S T P O N E
D U N T I L T
W O A M X Y z
C = “TTNAAPTMTSUOAODWCOIXKNLYPETZ”
Transposition Technique Cont…
• A pure transposition cipher is easily
recognized because it has the same letter
frequencies as original plaintext.
• Cryptanalyst just plays around with
column positions
• Two transposition stage can be done to
make it more stronger
Double transposition
• Re-enciphering the cipher text, consider the
ciphertext obtained above and make it a plaintext.
Use the same key
P = “TTNAAPTMTSUOAODWCOIXKNLYPETZ”

4 3 1 2 5 6 7
T T N A A P T
M T S U O A O
D W C O I X K
N L Y P E T Z
C = “NSCYAUOPTTWLTMDNAOIEPAXTTOKZ”
Note

• Revise both substitution and

transposition techniques