Chapter 3

Traditional
Symmetric-Key Ciphers

Yawai Tint 3.1

 Chapter 3
Learning Outcomes
❏ To define the terms and the concepts of symmetric key ciphers
❏ To emphasize the two categories of traditional ciphers:
substitution and transposition ciphers
❏ To describe the categories of cryptanalysis used to break the
symmetric ciphers
❏ To introduce the concepts of the stream ciphers and block ciphers
❏ To discuss some very dominant ciphers used in the past, such as
the Enigma machine

Yawai Tint 3.2

 INTRODUCTION

Figure shows the general idea behind a symmetric-key cipher. The

original message from Alice to Bob is called plaintext; the message
that is sent through the channel is called the ciphertext. To create the
ciphertext from the plaintext, Alice uses an encryption algorithm and a
shared secret key. To create the plaintext from ciphertext, Bob uses a
decryption algorithm and the same secret key.

Topics discussed in this section:

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Cont’d

General idea of symmetric-key cipher

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Cont’d

If P is the plaintext, C is the ciphertext, and K is the key,

We assume that Bob creates P1; we prove that P1 = P:

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Cont’d

Locking and unlocking with the same key

Yawai Tint 3.6
 Kerckhoff’s Principle

Based on Kerckhoff’s principle, one should always assume that the

adversary, Eve, knows the encryption/decryption algorithm. The
resistance of the cipher to attack must be based only on the secrecy of
the key.

Yawai Tint 3.7

 Cryptanalysis

As cryptography is the science and art of creating secret codes,

cryptanalysis is the science and art of breaking those codes.

Yawai Tint
Cryptanalysis attacks 3.8
 Cont’d
Ciphertext-Only Attack

Ciphertext-only attack

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 Cont’d
Known-Plaintext Attack

Known-plaintext attack

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 Cont’d
Chosen-Plaintext Attack

Chosen-plaintext attack
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 Cont’d
Chosen-Ciphertext Attack

Chosen-ciphertext attack
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 SUBSTITUTION CIPHERS

A substitution cipher replaces one symbol with another. Substitution

ciphers can be categorized as either monoalphabetic ciphers or
polyalphabetic ciphers.

Note
A substitution cipher replaces one symbol with another.

Topics discussed in this section:

Yawai Tint 3.13

 Monoalphabetic Ciphers

Note
In monoalphabetic substitution, the relationship
between a symbol in the plaintext to a symbol in the
ciphertext is always one-to-one.

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 Cont’d

Example 3.1
The following shows a plaintext and its corresponding ciphertext. The
cipher is probably monoalphabetic because both l’s (els) are encrypted
as O’s.

Example 3.2
The following shows a plaintext and its corresponding ciphertext. The
cipher is not monoalphabetic because each l (el) is encrypted by a
different character.

Ciphertext: ABNZF
Yawai Tint 3.15
 Cont’d
Additive Cipher

The simplest monoalphabetic cipher is the additive cipher. This cipher

is sometimes called a shift cipher and sometimes a Caesar cipher, but
the term additive cipher better reveals its mathematical nature.

Plaintext and ciphertext in Z26

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 Cont’d

Additive cipher
Note
When the cipher is additive, the plaintext, ciphertext, and key
are integers in Z26.

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 Cont’d
Example 3.3

Use the additive cipher with key = 15 to encrypt the message “hello”.

Solution
We apply the encryption algorithm to the plaintext, character by
character:

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 Cont’d
Example 3.4

Use the additive cipher with key = 15 to decrypt the message

“WTAAD”.
Solution
We apply the decryption algorithm to the plaintext character by
character:

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 Cont’d
Shift Cipher and Caesar Cipher
Historically, additive ciphers are called shift ciphers. Julius Caesar
used an additive cipher to communicate with his officers. For this
reason, additive ciphers are sometimes referred to as the Caesar
cipher. Caesar used a key of 3 for his communications.

Note
Additive ciphers are sometimes referred to as shift ciphers
or Caesar cipher.

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 Cont’d
Example 3.5
Eve has intercepted the ciphertext “UVACLYFZLJBYL”. Show how
she can use a brute-force attack to break the cipher.
Solution
Eve tries keys from 1 to 7. With a key of 7, the plaintext is “not very
secure”, which makes sense.

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 Cont’d
Frequency of characters in English

Frequency of diagrams and trigrams

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 Cont’d
Example 3.6

Eve has intercepted the following ciphertext. Using a statistical attack,

find the plaintext.

Solution
When Eve tabulates the frequency of letters in this ciphertext, she
gets: I =14, V =13, S =12, and so on. The most common character is I
with 14 occurrences. This means key = 4.

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 Cont’d
Multiplicative Ciphers

Multiplicative cipher

Note
In a multiplicative cipher, the plaintext and ciphertext are
integers in Z26; the key is an integer in Z26*.

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 Cont’d

Example 3.7
What is the key domain for any multiplicative cipher?
Solution
The key needs to be in Z26*. This set has only 12 members: 1, 3, 5, 7,
9, 11, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25.
Example 3.8
We use a multiplicative cipher to encrypt the message “hello” with a
key of 7. The ciphertext is “XCZZU”.

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 Cont’d
Affine Ciphers

Affine cipher

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 Cont’d

Example 3.09
The affine cipher uses a pair of keys in which the first key is from Z 26*
and the second is from Z26. The size of the key domain is
26 × 12 = 312.
Example 3.10
Use an affine cipher to encrypt the message “hello” with the key pair
(7, 2).

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 Cont’d

Example 3.11
Use the affine cipher to decrypt the message “ZEBBW” with the key
pair (7, 2) in modulus 26.
Solution

Example 3.12
The additive cipher is a special case of an affine cipher in which
k1 = 1. The multiplicative cipher is a special case of affine cipher in
which k2 = 0.
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 Cont’d
Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher

Because additive, multiplicative, and affine ciphers have small key

domains, they are very vulnerable to brute-force attack.

A better solution is to create a mapping between each plaintext

character and the corresponding ciphertext character. Alice and Bob
can agree on a table showing the mapping for each character.

An example key for monoalphabetic substitution cipher

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 Cont’d

Example 3.13
We can use the key in Figure to encrypt the message

The ciphertext is

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 Polyalphabetic Ciphers

In polyalphabetic substitution, each occurrence of a character may

have a different substitute. The relationship between a character in the
plaintext to a character in the ciphertext is one-to-many.

Autokey Cipher

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 Cont’d
Example 3.14
Assume that Alice and Bob agreed to use an autokey cipher with
initial key value k1 = 12. Now Alice wants to send Bob the message
“Attack is today”. Enciphering is done character by character.

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 Cont’d
Playfair Cipher
An example of a secret key in the Playfair cipher

Example 3.15
Let us encrypt the plaintext “hello” using the key in Figure 3.13.

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 Cont’d
Vigenere Cipher

Example 3.16
We can encrypt the message “She is listening” using the 6-character
keyword “PASCAL”.

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 Cont’d
Example 3.16
Let us see how we can encrypt the message “She is listening” using
the 6-character keyword “PASCAL”. The initial key stream is (15, 0,
18, 2, 0, 11). The key stream is the repetition of this initial key stream
(as many times as needed).

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 Cont’d
Example 3.17

Vigenere cipher can be seen as combinations of m additive ciphers.

Yawai Tint 3.36

A Vigenere cipher as a combination of m additive ciphers

 Cont’d
Example 3.18
Using Example 3.18, we can say that the additive cipher is a special
case of Vigenere cipher in which m = 1.

A Vigenere Tableau

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 Cont’d
Example 3.19

Let us assume we have intercepted the following ciphertext:

The Kasiski test for repetition of three-character segments yields the

results shown in Table 3.4.

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 Cont’d
Example 3.19 (Continued)
The greatest common divisor of differences is 4, which means that the
key length is multiple of 4. First try m = 4.

In this case, the plaintext makes sense.

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 Cont’d
Hill Cipher

Key in the Hill cipher

Note
The key matrix in the Hill cipher needs to have a multiplicative
inverse.
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 Cont’d
Example 3.20
For example, the plaintext “code is ready” can make a 3 × 4 matrix
when adding extra bogus character “z” to the last block and removing
the spaces. The ciphertext is “OHKNIHGKLISS”.

Example 3.20

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 Cont’d
Example 3.21
Assume that Eve knows that m = 3. She has intercepted three
plaintext/ciphertext pair blocks (not necessarily from the same
message) as shown in Figure 3.17.
Example 3.21

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 Cont’d
Example 3.21 (Continued)

She makes matrices P and C from these pairs. Because P is invertible,

she inverts the P matrix and multiplies it by C to get the K matrix as
shown in Figure 3.18.

Example 3.21

Now she has the key and can break any ciphertext encrypted with that
key.
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 Cont’d
One-Time Pad

One of the goals of cryptography is perfect secrecy. A study by

Shannon has shown that perfect secrecy can be achieved if each
plaintext symbol is encrypted with a key
randomly chosen from a key domain. This idea is used in a cipher
called one-time pad, invented by Vernam.

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 Cont’d
Rotor Cipher

A rotor cipher

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 Cont’d
Enigma Machine

A schematic of the Enigma machine

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 TRANSPOSITION CIPHERS
A transposition cipher does not substitute one symbol for another,
instead it changes the location of the symbols.

Note

A transposition cipher reorders symbols.

Topics discussed in this section:

Yawai Tint 3.47

 Keyless Transposition Ciphers

Simple transposition ciphers, which were used in the past, are keyless.

Example 3.22
A good example of a keyless cipher using the first method is the rail
fence cipher. The ciphertext is created reading the pattern row by row.
For example, to send the message “Meet me at the park” to Bob, Alice
writes

She then creates the ciphertext “MEMATEAKETETHPR”.

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 Cont’d
Example 3.23

Alice and Bob can agree on the number of columns and use the second
method. Alice writes the same plaintext, row by row, in a table of four
columns.

She then creates the ciphertext “MMTAEEHREAEKTTP”.

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 Cont’d
Example 3.24
 The cipher in Example 3.23 is actually a transposition cipher. The
following shows the permutation of each character in the plaintext
into the ciphertext based on the positions.

The second character in the plaintext has moved to the fifth position in
the ciphertext; the third character has moved to the ninth position; and
so on. Although the characters are permuted,
there is a pattern in the permutation: (01, 05, 09, 13), (02, 06, 10, 13),
(03, 07, 11, 15), and (08, 12). In each section, the difference between
the two adjacent numbers is 4.
Yawai Tint 3.50
 Keyed Transposition Ciphers

 The keyless ciphers permute the characters by using writing

plaintext in one way and reading it in another way The permutation
is done on the whole plaintext to create the whole ciphertext.
Another method is to divide the plaintext into groups of
predetermined size, called blocks, and then use a key to permute
the characters in each block separately.

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 Cont’d
Example 3.25

Alice needs to send the message “Enemy attacks tonight” to Bob..

The key used for encryption and decryption is a permutation key,

which shows how the character are permuted.

The permutation yields

Yawai Tint 3.52

 Combining Two Approaches

Example 3.26

Yawai Tint 3.53

 Cont’d
Keys
In Example 3.27, a single key was used in two directions for the
column exchange: downward for encryption, upward for decryption. It
is customary to create two keys.

Encryption/decryption keys in transpositional ciphers

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 Cont’d

Key inversion in a transposition cipher

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 Cont’d
Using Matrices
We can use matrices to show the encryption/decryption process for a
transposition cipher.

Example 3.27

Yawai Tint
Representation of the key as a matrix in the transposition cipher 3.56
 Cont’d
Example 3.27
Figure 3.24 shows the encryption process. Multiplying the 4 × 5
plaintext matrix by the 5 × 5 encryption key gives the 4 × 5 ciphertext
matrix.

Representation of the key as a matrix in the transposition cipher

Yawai Tint 3.57

 Cont’d
Double Transposition Ciphers

Yawai Tint
Double transposition cipher 3.58
 STREAM AND BLOCK CIPHERS

 The literature divides the symmetric ciphers into two broad

categories: stream ciphers and block ciphers. Although the
definitions are normally applied to modern ciphers, this
categorization also applies to traditional ciphers.

Topics discussed in this section:

Yawai Tint 3.59

 Stream Ciphers

Call the plaintext stream P, the ciphertext stream C, and the key
stream K.

Figure 3.26 Stream cipher

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 Cont’d

Example 3.30
Additive ciphers can be categorized as stream ciphers in which the key
stream is the repeated value of the key. In other words, the key stream
is considered as a predetermined stream of keys or
K = (k, k, …, k). In this cipher, however, each character in the
ciphertext depends only on the corresponding character in the
plaintext, because the key stream is generated independently.

Example 3.31
The monoalphabetic substitution ciphers discussed in this chapter are
also stream ciphers. However, each value of the key stream in this
case is the mapping of the current plaintext character to the
corresponding ciphertext character in the mapping table.
Yawai Tint 3.61
 Cont’d

Example 3.32
Vigenere ciphers are also stream ciphers according to the definition.
In this case, the key stream is a repetition of m values, where m is the
size of the keyword. In other words,

Example 3.33
We can establish a criterion to divide stream ciphers based on their
key streams. We can say that a stream cipher is a monoalphabetic
cipher if the value of ki does not depend on the position of the
plaintext character in the plaintext stream; otherwise, the cipher is
polyalphabetic.
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 Cont’d
Example 3.33 (Continued)

 Additive ciphers are definitely monoalphabetic because ki in the

key stream is fixed; it does not depend on the position of the character
in the plaintext.

 Monoalphabetic substitution ciphers are monoalphabetic because ki

does not depend on the position of the corresponding character in the
plaintext stream; it depends only on the value of the plaintext
character.

 Vigenere ciphers are polyalphabetic ciphers because ki definitely

depends on the position of the plaintext character. However, the
dependency is cyclic. The key is the same for two characters m
positions apart.
Yawai Tint 3.63
 Stream Ciphers

In a block cipher, a group of plaintext symbols of size m (m > 1) are

encrypted together creating a group of ciphertext of the same size. A
single key is used to encrypt the whole block even if the key is made
of multiple values. Figure 3.27 shows the concept of a block cipher.

Block cipher
Yawai Tint 3.64
 Cont’d

Example 3.34
Playfair ciphers are block ciphers. The size of the block is m = 2. Two
characters are encrypted together.
Example 3.35
Hill ciphers are block ciphers. A block of plaintext, of size 2 or more
is encrypted together using a single key (a matrix). In these ciphers,
the value of each character in the ciphertext depends on all the values
of the characters in the plaintext. Although the key is made of m × m
values, it is considered as a single key.
Example 3.36
From the definition of the block cipher, it is clear that every block
cipher is a polyalphabetic cipher because each character in a
ciphertext block depends on all characters in the plaintext block.
Yawai Tint 3.65
 Combination

 In practice, blocks of plaintext are encrypted individually, but they

use a stream of keys to encrypt the whole message block by block.
In other words, the cipher is a block cipher when looking at the
individual blocks, but it is a stream cipher when looking at the
whole message considering each block as a single unit.

Yawai Tint 3.66