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Transposition Cipher

This document discusses transposition ciphers, which reorder the units of plaintext without altering them. It describes the Rail Fence cipher, Route cipher and Columnar transposition cipher. The Rail Fence cipher writes plaintext diagonally across multiple "rails" and reads off in rows. The Route cipher writes plaintext in a grid and reads it following a predetermined route. Columnar transposition writes plaintext in a grid and reads it column-by-column in a scrambled order defined by a keyword. Transposition ciphers are weak because they don't alter plaintext letters. The document also contrasts transposition with substitution ciphers, which retain plaintext unit order but alter the units themselves.

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Fasih Ur Rasheed
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660 views

Transposition Cipher

This document discusses transposition ciphers, which reorder the units of plaintext without altering them. It describes the Rail Fence cipher, Route cipher and Columnar transposition cipher. The Rail Fence cipher writes plaintext diagonally across multiple "rails" and reads off in rows. The Route cipher writes plaintext in a grid and reads it following a predetermined route. Columnar transposition writes plaintext in a grid and reads it column-by-column in a scrambled order defined by a keyword. Transposition ciphers are weak because they don't alter plaintext letters. The document also contrasts transposition with substitution ciphers, which retain plaintext unit order but alter the units themselves.

Uploaded by

Fasih Ur Rasheed
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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TRANSPOSITION CIPHER:

In cryptography, a transposition cipher is a method of encryption by which the


positions held by units of plaintext (which are commonly characters or groups of
characters) are shifted according to a regular system, so that
the ciphertext constitutes a permutation(rearrangement) of the plaintext. That is,
the order of the units is changed (the plaintext is reordered).
In a transposition cipher, the letter are just moved around. The letters or words of
the plain text are recorded in some way, fixed by a given rule (the key).
Transposition cipheres encrypt plaintext by moving s,all pieces of the message
around. Anagram are a primitive transposition cipher.
Transposition cipher are of different types,we discuss some types here :
1) Rail Fence cipher
2) Route cipher
3) Columnar cipher(Regular and irregular)

RAIL FENCE CIPHER:


The rail fence cipher (also called a zigzag cipher) is a form of transposition cipher.
It derives its name from the way in which it is encoded.
In the rail fence cipher, the plaintext is written downwards and diagonally on
successive "rails" of an imaginary fence, then moving up when we reach the bottom
rail. When we reach the top rail, the message is written downwards again until the
whole plaintext is written out. The message is then read off in rows.
The railfence cipher is a very simple, easy to crack cipher. It is a transposition cipher
that follows a simple rule for mixing up the characters in the plaintext to form the
ciphertext. The railfence cipher offers essentially no communication security, and it
will be shown that it can be easily broken even by hand.
Although weak on its own, it can be combined with other ciphers, such as a
substitution cipher, the combination of which is more difficult to break than either
cipher on it's own.
EXAMPLE:

ROUTE CIPHER:
The Route cipher is a transposition cipher where the kry is which route to follow
when reading the cipher text from the block created with the plain text. The plain
text is written in a grid,and then read off following the route chosen.
OR
A route cipher is very similar to the rail fence cipher with one exception that you still
write the message vertically in columns but instead of reading the message
horizontally you read it by using a pre-determined pattern.
EXAMPLE :

COLUMNAR TRANSPOSITION CIPHER:

In a columnar transposition, the message is written out in rows of a fixed length,


and then read out again column by column, and the columns are chosen in some
scrambled order. Both the width of the rows and the permutation of the columns are
usually defined by a keyword. For example, the word ZEBRAS is of length 6 (so the
rows are of length 6), and the permutation is defined by the alphabetical order of
the letters in the keyword. In this case, the order would be "6 3 2 4 1 5".
We have two cases of columnar transposition cipher:
1) Regular case
2) Irregular case

Regular Case:
In a regular case the empty spaces are filled with random letters.
EXAPMPLE:

Irregular case :

In an irregular case the empty spaces are not filled by any other letters, i.e the
spaces will remain empty.

DRAWBACK:
Transposition ciphers are not highly secure because they do not change the letters
in the plaintext or even cover up frequencies, but they can be built upon to make
more secure methods of encryption.
The main problem with these ciphers is that the actual letters are not changed, so
frequency counts reveal not only trends in letter repetition but the actual plaintext
letter that the ciphertext is linked to (because they are the same letter!). Generally
speaking, having the plaintext and ciphertext letters line up exactly with each other
always leads to easily deciphered messages.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRANSPOSITION CIPHER AND


SUBSITUTION CIPHER:
Substitution and transposition ciphers are two categories of ciphers used in classical
cryptography. Substitution and transposition differ in how chunks of the message
are handled by the encryption process.
Substitution ciphers can be compared with transposition ciphers. In a transposition
cipher, the units of the plaintext are rearranged in a different and usually quite
complex order, but the units themselves are left unchanged. By contrast, in a
substitution cipher, the units of the plaintext are retained in the same sequence in
the ciphertext, but the units themselves are altered.
*SUBSTITUTION CIPHER*
There are a number of different types of substitution cipher. If the cipher operates
on single letters, it is termed a simple substitution cipher; a cipher that operates
on larger groups of letters is termed polygraphic. A monoalphabetic cipheruses
fixed substitution over the entire message, whereas a polyalphabetic cipher uses
a number of substitutions at different positions in the message, where a unit from
the plaintext is mapped to one of several possibilities in the ciphertext and vice
versa.

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