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Caesar Cipher Report

The document discusses the history and workings of the Caesar cipher. It was created by Julius Caesar to encrypt military messages with a shift of 3 letters. The cipher substitutes each letter in the plaintext with one 3 positions further down the alphabet. It is a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher but is also easy to crack due to its limited possibilities. Modern examples of the Caesar cipher include the ROT13 cipher.

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713 views

Caesar Cipher Report

The document discusses the history and workings of the Caesar cipher. It was created by Julius Caesar to encrypt military messages with a shift of 3 letters. The cipher substitutes each letter in the plaintext with one 3 positions further down the alphabet. It is a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher but is also easy to crack due to its limited possibilities. Modern examples of the Caesar cipher include the ROT13 cipher.

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Anonymous troowCm6PR
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© © All Rights Reserved
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TA1 IDE 08 | Mathematics of Passwords Report

CAESARS
CIPHER
MEMBERS:
Avril Tay Yoong Xin
Lorenzo Ong Wei Yang
Yeo Tze Hern
1B|08

HISTORY & DEVELOPMENT


Named after Julius Caesar.
1

It was used during 50BC by notable Romans including Julius Caesar.


In cryptography, the Caesar cipher is also known as Caesars shift or the Shirt
Cipher.
Julius Caesar used the Caesar cipher to communicate with his generals during
military campaigns to protect and encrypt messages that were important to
the military and the government.
The Caesar Cipher is a type of substitution cipher. Each letter in the plaintext
is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions further down the
alphabet.
The Caesar cipher is a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, meaning only
one letter is assigned to the alphabet it is supposed to represent
According to Suetonius, who wrote the book Life of Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar
used the substitution cipher to a shift of three; meaning shifted each letter 3
places further through the alphabet. a(plaintext) becomes D(cipher).
If he had anything confidential to say, he wrote it in cipher, that is, by so
changing the order of the letters of the alphabet, that not a word could be
made out. If anyone wishes to decipher these, and get at their meaning, he
must substitute the fourth letter of the alphabet, namely D, for A, and so with
the others
- Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar 56
Julius Caesars nephew, Augustus, also used the Caesar cipher. However, he
used it to the shift of one
According to David Kahns book, The Code Breakers, lovers used the Caesar
code to communicate secretly.
In the Caesar Cipher, the plaintext is usually in lower case while the cipher
text is in upper case.
The ROT13 is an application of the Caesar cipher. ROT13 replaces each letter
by its partner 13 characters further down the alphabet. As the alphabet
consist of 26 letters, the ROT13 function is its own inverse, meaning C
becomes P and P becomes C.

HOW TO USE
The Caesar Cipher replaces each letter in the plain text (the alphabet) with a
letter that has a fixed number of places down the alphabet. For example, the
diagram below has defined its parameters with a shift of 3 also known as the
Caesar shift.
2

As such, the letter B in the plaintext becomes E in the ciphertext. Here is a


sample of the revolvable cipher which makes encryption much more convenient
by turning the inner and outer wheel.

The outer wheel is the original alphabet or plaintext and the inner wheel is the
ciphertext which can be adjusted accordingly.

To encrypt a phrase or word, we could use the table above, where the letters in
the dark blue boxes represent the plaintext or the alphabet while the letters in
the boxes shaded light blue is the cipher text according to Caesars Shift of 3.
Therefore, to encrypt the phrase HELLO, it would look like this: KHOOR.
PROS & CONS
The good points of the Caesar cipher is that it is very simple to use. All a person
has to do is to write out his message and then referring to his cipher, rewrite his
message again, now encrypted. To give the recipient the key, one can just tell
them for example move back 3 so c would be represented by z, and d
3

would be represented by a. No machines or devices are needed to decode it. A


paper and pen for convenience may be all that you need.
The bad points are that due to the nature of the cipher, an encrypted text has
only 26 possibilities, 25 not including the given text. Within 5 minutes, an
experienced cryptobreaker could crack the code. Anyone else could crack the
code in 10 minutes. With the revolvable cipher, anyone could crack the code in
4-5 minutes. The key could be obtained through trial and error. This is called a
Brute Force Attack.
To save time a series of strips could be prepared. Each with 52 letters, the letters
would be in alphabetical order twice over. The strips would be aligned so that the
ciphertext read in one position. They would then be scanned to reveal the
plaintext.
An alternative and quicker way to guessing/trial and error is through observing
the frequency of the letters. Here is a diagram representing the frequency of the
letters in the alphabet.

For example, if a certain letter z for example is noticed to be repeated very


oftenly in the ciphertext, you could start off by guessing that z represents e, the
most commonly used letter in the alphabet. Subsequently you can use this
method to determine the rest of the letters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher

http://www.murky.org/blg/the-caesar-shift/

Chris Savarese and Brian Hart, The Caesar Cipher, 1999

F.L. Bauer, Decrypted Secrets, 2nd edition, 2000, Springer

David Kahn, The Codebreakers The Story of Secret Writing

http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/caesar-cipher/history-and-usage.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROT13
http://all.net/BOOKS/IP/cHAP2-1.HTML

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