Conventional crypto

Diffusion and confusion How Mary Queen of Scots lost her head Various hand operable ciphers Various Enigmas

Conventional crypto - Noack

Confusion and diffusion

Confusion
Replacing one element by another of the same size, seemingly randomly chosen The substitution must be one-to-one so it can be undone

Diffusion
Permuting the elements from place to place in a seemingly random fashion Permutations rather than random scrambles must be used so the rearrangement can be undone

Expansion and hiding

Ciphers that dont expand the text rely on confusion and diffusion Concealment ciphers bury the content in noise or nondata

Conventional crypto - Noack

Confusion methods
Monoalphabetic substitution
Trivial example Caesar cipher
He replaced each letter of the plaintext by one three letters before Weakness is the fixed scheme once diagnosed, the Gauls win

Fairly trivial example randomly chosen permuted alphabet

26! Of these alphabets exist a very large number Frequency table is used to break this one plaintext has nonuniform distribution of characters and diphthongs

Polyalphabetic substitution
A sequence of permutation alphabets is used Methods include
Vigenere table (very simplistic) Code strips and such (bulky) Rotor machine

Conventional crypto - Noack

Comments on permutations
A permutation is
A one-to-one mapping of a set onto itself With the underlying operation it forms a group (more later) A permutation of a permutation is still a permutation An substitution alphabet is a permutation, but the resulting cipher is not a permutation Permutations have unique inverses The simple transposition ciphers are permutations

Conventional crypto - Noack

Diffusion methods
Transposition ciphers
General idea is to rearrange the characters without changing them to produce a random-appearing text. Example Playfair cipher named for its inventor

Conventional crypto - Noack

Monoalphabetic cipher example

U Z C B R Y A O L D E Z P U V N A Y A L D V R E F U S I N G - T O - B E - D R A W N - I N T O - A T Z A O L M X V U O B S Z A L L E N G T H Y - A R G U M E N T L M Z E V E X R Y - T H E - B A B Y S I -

L L Z U N Y R Z T X N Y L M P U Z N C U D S L M Z T T E R - W I S E L Y - W I T H D R E W - F R O M - T H E E Z P U D D S B E D R O O M -

' '

- A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z - N U F O B T H W G D S M L R A Y I E 5 2 2 5 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 9 4 4 3 3 0 3 3 2 7 4 0 3 5 10 Typical newspaper monoalphabetic crypto puzzle

Note the use of the frequency table A bit easier Excel wasnt available in those days These often have nonstandard letter frequencies Also they have blanks
Conventional crypto - Noack

How Mary Queen of Scots lost her head

Note: This is nothing but a monoalphabetic cipher with some word substitution
From Singh, Simon, The Code Book

Conventional crypto - Noack

The 4-rotor Enigma, with wiring

pictures from Budiansky, Stephen, Battle of Wits

Uses the polyalphabetic principle

Repositioning the rotors gives a new alphabet The rotors are stepped at each character It was broken at least partly because of operator carelessness
Conventional crypto - Noack

The Bombe , used to break Enigma messages

Comments This is actually a copy of the machine conceived by Turing It still used a plugboard approach rather than a strictly electronic stored program Material captured from ships and submarines was also used This was a combination of known plaintext and brute force cryptanalysis It is not a Turing machine in the computer science sense
picture from Budiansky, Stephen, Battle of Wits

Conventional crypto - Noack

The Vigenere table and an example

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

H O W D O Y O U U S E T H I S T H I C R Y P T O C R Y P T O C R Y P T O K F V T I N R M T I Y I K A R J B X How do you use this thing

Weaknesses
Only one simple shifted translation alphabet Relatively short period Can be broken by frequency analysis of spaced groups Could be strengthened somewhat with a longer keyword and different alphabets

The Vigenere table

Conventional crypto - Noack