Vigenère cipher:

The Vigenère cipher is named for Blaise de Vigenère (pictured), although Giovan Battista
Bellaso had invented the cipher earlier. Vigenère did invent a stronger autokey cipher.The
Vigenère cipher is a method of encrypting alphabetic text by using a series of different Caesar
ciphers based on the letters of a keyword. It is a simple form of polyalphabetic substitution.The
Vigenère (French pronunciation: [viʒnɛːʁ]) cipher has been reinvented many times. The method
was originally described by Giovan Battista Bellaso in his 1553 book La cifra del. Sig. Giovan
Battista Bellaso; however, the scheme was later misattributed to Blaise de Vigenère in the 19th
century, and is now widely known as the "Vigenère cipher".This cipher is well known because
while it is easy to understand and implement, it often appears to beginners to be unbreakable;
this earned it the description le chiffre indéchiffrable (French for 'the unbreakable cipher').
Consequently, many people have tried to implement encryption schemes that are essentially
Vigenère ciphers, only to have them broken.

History:
The first well documented description of a polyalphabetic cipher was formulated by Leon
Battista Alberti around 1467 and used a metal cipher disc to switch between cipher alphabets.
Alberti's system only switched alphabets after several words, and switches were indicated by
writing the letter of the corresponding alphabet in the ciphertext. Later, in 1508, Johannes
Trithemius, in his work Poligraphia, invented the tabula recta, a critical component of the
Vigenère cipher. Trithemius, however, only provided a progressive, rigid and predictable system
for switching between cipher alphabets. This was known as the Trithemius cipher.What is now
known as the Vigenère cipher was originally described by Giovan Battista Bellaso in his 1553
book La cifra del. Sig. Giovan Battista Bellaso. He built upon the tabula recta of Trithemius, but
added a repeating "countersign" (a key) to switch cipher alphabets every letter.Blaise de
Vigenère published his description of a similar but stronger autokey cipher before the court of
Henry III of France, in 1586. Later, in the 19th century, the invention of Bellaso's cipher was
misattributed to Vigenère. David Kahn in his book The Codebreakers lamented the misattribution
by saying that history had "ignored this important contribution and instead named a regressive
and elementary cipher for him [Vigenère] though he had nothing to do with it".A reproduction of
the Confederacy's cipher disk. Only five originals are known to exist.
The Vigenère cipher gained a reputation for being exceptionally strong. Noted author and
mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) called the Vigenère cipher
unbreakable in his 1868 piece "The Alphabet Cipher" in a children's magazine. In 1917, Scientific
American described the Vigenère cipher as "impossible of translation". This reputation was not
deserved. Charles Babbage broke the cipher; however, he didn't publish his work.Kasiski entirely
broke the cipher and published the technique in the 19th century. Even before this, though, some
skilled cryptanalysts could occasionally break the cipher in the 16th century.The Vigenère cipher
is simple enough to be a field cipher if it is used in conjunction with cipher disks.The Confederate
States of America, for example, used a brass cipher disk to implement the Vigenère cipher during
the American Civil War. The Confederacy's messages were far from secret and the Union
regularly cracked their messages. Throughout the war, the Confederate leadership primarily
relied upon three key phrases, "Manchester Bluff", "Complete Victory" and, as the war came to a
close, "Come Retribution".Gilbert Vernam tried to repair the broken cipher (creating the Vernam-
Vigenère cipher in 1918), but, no matter what he did, the cipher was still vulnerable to
cryptanalysis. Vernam's work, however, eventually led to the one-time pad, a provably
unbreakable cipher.

Description:
The Vigenère square or Vigenère table, also known as the tabula recta, can be used for
encryption and decryption.In a Caesar cipher, each letter of the alphabet is shifted along some
number of places; for example, in a Caesar cipher of shift 3, A would become D, B would become
E and so on. The Vigenère cipher consists of several Caesar ciphers in sequence with different
shift values.To encrypt, a table of alphabets can be used, termed a tabula recta, Vigenère square,
or Vigenère table. It consists of the alphabet written out 26 times in different rows, each alphabet
shifted cyclically to the left compared to the previous alphabet, corresponding to the 26 possible
Caesar ciphers. At different points in the encryption process, the cipher uses a different alphabet
from one of the rows. The alphabet used at each point depends on a repeating keyword.

For example, suppose that the plaintext to be encrypted is:

ATTACKATDAWN

The person sending the message chooses a keyword and repeats it until it matches the length of
the plaintext, for example, the keyword "LEMON":

LEMONLEMONLE

The first letter of the plaintext, A, is enciphered using the alphabet in row L, which is the
first letter of the key. This is done by looking at the letter in row L and column A of the Vigenère
square, namely L. Similarly, for the second letter of the plaintext, the second letter of the key is
used; the letter at row E and column T is X. The rest of the plaintext is enciphered in a similar
fashion:
Plaintext: ATTACKATDAWN
Key: LEMONLEMONLE
Ciphertext: LXFOPVEFRNHR

Decryption is performed by going to the row in the table corresponding to the key, finding
the position of the ciphertext letter in this row, and then using the column's label as the plaintext.
For example, in row L (from LEMON), the ciphertext L appears in column A, which is the first
plaintext letter. Next we go to row E (from LEMON), find the ciphertext X in column T, which is the
second plaintext letter.Vigenère can also be viewed algebraically. If the letters A–Z are taken to
be the numbers 0–25, and addition is performed modulo 26, then Vigenère encryption can be
written,

C_i \equiv (P_i + K_i) \pmod {26}

and decryption,

P_i \equiv (C_i - K_i) \pmod {26}

Thus using the previous example, to encrypt A (\equiv 0) with key letter L (\equiv 11) the
calculation would result in 11 \equiv L.

11 \equiv (0+11) \pmod {26}

Therefore to decrypt R (\equiv 17) with key letter E (\equiv 4) the calculation would result in 13
\equiv N.

13 \equiv (17-4) \pmod {26}

Cryptanalysis:
The Vigenère cipher masks the characteristic letter frequencies of English plaintexts, but some
patterns remain.The idea behind the Vigenère cipher, like all polyalphabetic ciphers, is to disguise
plaintext letter frequencies, which interferes with a straightforward application of frequency
analysis. For instance, if P is the most frequent letter in a ciphertext whose plaintext is in English,
one might suspect that P corresponds to E, because E is the most frequently used letter in
English. However, using the Vigenère cipher, E can be enciphered as different ciphertext letters
at different points in the message, thus defeating simple frequency analysis.The primary
weakness of the Vigenère cipher is the repeating nature of its key. If a cryptanalyst correctly
guesses the key's length, then the cipher text can be treated as interwoven Caesar ciphers, which
individually are easily broken. The Kasiski and Friedman tests can help determine the key length.

Kasiski examination:
In 1863 Friedrich Kasiski was the first to publish a successful general attack on the
Vigenère cipher. Earlier attacks relied on knowledge of the plaintext, or use of a recognizable
word as a key. Kasiski's method had no such dependencies. Kasiski was the first to publish an
account of the attack, but it's clear that there were others who were aware of it. In 1854, Charles
Babbage was goaded into breaking the Vigenère cipher when John Hall Brock Thwaites
submitted a "new" cipher to the Journal of the Society of the Arts. When Babbage showed that
Thwaites' cipher was essentially just another recreation of the Vigenère cipher, Thwaites
challenged Babbage to break his cipher encoded twice, with keys of different length. Babbage
succeeded in decrypting a sample, which turned out to be the poem "The Vision of Sin", by Alfred
Tennyson, encrypted according to the keyword "Emily", the first name of Tennyson's wife.
Babbage never explained the method he used. Studies of Babbage's notes reveal that he had
used the method later published by Kasiski, and suggest that he had been using the method as
early as 1846.The Kasiski examination, also called the Kasiski test, takes advantage of the fact
that repeated words may, by chance, sometimes be encrypted using the same key letters,
leading to repeated groups in the ciphertext. For example, Consider the following encryption
using the keyword ABCD:

Key: ABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCD
Plaintext: CRYPTOISSHORTFORCRYPTOGRAPHY
Ciphertext: CSASTPKVSIQUTGQUCSASTPIUAQJB

There is an easily seen repetition in the ciphertext, and the Kasiski test will be effective.
Here the distance between the repetitions of CSASTP is 16. Assuming that the repeated
segments represent the same plaintext segments, this implies that the key is 16, 8, 4, 2, or 1
characters long. (All factors of the distance are possible key lengths – a key of length one is just a
simple shift cipher, where cryptanalysis is much easier.) Since key lengths 2 and 1 are
unrealistically short, one only needs to try lengths 16, 8, or 4. Longer messages make the test
more accurate because they usually contain more repeated ciphertext segments. The following
ciphertext has two segments that are repeated:

Ciphertext: VHVSSPQUCEMRVBNBBBVHVSURQGIBDUGRNICJQUCERVUAXSSR

The distance between the repetitions of VHVS is 18. Assuming that the repeated
segments represent the same plaintext segments, this implies that the key is 18, 9, 6, 3, 2, or 1
characters long. The distance between the repetitions of QUCE is 30 characters. This means that
the key length could be 30, 15, 10, 6, 5, 3, 2, or 1 characters long. By taking the intersection of
these sets one could safely conclude that the most likely key length is 6, since 3, 2, and 1 are
unrealistically short.

Friedman test:
The Friedman test (sometimes known as the kappa test) was invented during the 1920s
by William F. Friedman. Friedman used the index of coincidence, which measures the
unevenness of the cipher letter frequencies, to break the cipher. By knowing the probability κp
that any two randomly chosen source-language letters are the same (around 0.067
for monocase English) and the probability of a coincidence for a uniform random
selection from the alphabet κr (1/26 = 0.0385 for English), the key length can be
estimated as:
 {\kappa_p-\kappa_r}\over{\kappa_o-\kappa_r}

from the observed coincidence rate

\kappa_o=\frac{\sum_{i=1}^{c}n_i(n_i -1)}{N(N-1)}

where c is the size of the alphabet (26 for English), N is the length of the text, and n1
through nc are the observed ciphertext letter frequencies, as integers.

This is, however, only an approximation whose accuracy increases with the
size of the text. It would in practice be necessary to try various key lengths close to
the estimate.A better approach for repeating-key ciphers is to copy the ciphertext
into rows of a matrix having as many columns as an assumed key length, then
compute the average index of coincidence with each column considered separately;
when this is done for each possible key length, the highest average I.C. then
corresponds to the most likely key length.Such tests may be supplemented by
information from the Kasiski examination.

Frequency analysis:
Once the length of the key is known, the ciphertext can be rewritten into that
many columns, with each column corresponding to a single letter of the key. Each
column consists of plaintext that has been encrypted by a single Caesar cipher; the
Caesar key (shift) is just the letter of the Vigenère key that was used for that column.
Using methods similar to those used to break the Caesar cipher, the letters in the ciphertext can
be discovered.An improvement to the Kasiski examination, known as Kerckhoffs' method,
matches each column's letter frequencies to shifted plaintext frequencies to discover the key
letter (Caesar shift) for that column. Once every letter in the key is known, the cryptanalyst can
simply decrypt the ciphertext and reveal the plaintext.Kerckhoffs' method is not applicable when
the Vigenère table has been scrambled, rather than using normal alphabetic sequences, although
Kasiski examination and coincidence tests can still be used to determine key length in that case.

Key Elimination:
The Vigenère cipher function is essentially modulo arithmetic, and thus commutative. So
if the key length is known (or guessed) then subtracting the cipher text from itself, offset by the
key length will produce the cipher text encrypted with itself. If any words in the cipher text are
known or can be guessed at then the plain text and hence the key will be revealed. This is useful
if the key is an obscure sequence of letters because the plain text will generally be ordinary
words.

Variants:
The running key variant of the Vigenère cipher was also considered unbreakable at one
time. This version uses as the key a block of text as long as the plaintext. Since the key is as long
as the message the Friedman and Kasiski tests no longer work (the key is not repeated). In 1920,
Friedman was the first to discover this variant's weaknesses. The problem with the running key
Vigenère cipher is that the cryptanalyst has statistical information about the key (assuming that
the block of text is in a known language) and that information will be reflected in the ciphertext.If
using a key which is truly random, is at least as long as the encrypted message and is used only
once, the Vigenère cipher is theoretically unbreakable. However, in this case it is the key, not the
cipher, which provides cryptographic strength and such systems are properly referred to
collectively as one time pad systems, irrespective of which ciphers are employed.Vigenère
actually invented a stronger cipher: an autokey cipher. The name "Vigenère cipher" became
associated with a simpler polyalphabetic cipher instead. In fact, the two ciphers were often
confused, and both were sometimes called "le chiffre indéchiffrable". Babbage actually broke the
much stronger autokey cipher, while Kasiski is generally credited with the first published solution
to the fixed-key polyalphabetic ciphers.A simple variant is to encrypt using the Vigenère
decryption method, and decrypt using Vigenère encryption. This method is sometimes referred to
as "Variant Beaufort". This is different from the Beaufort cipher, created by Sir Francis Beaufort,
which nonetheless is similar to Vigenère but uses a slightly modified enciphering mechanism and
tableau. The Beaufort cipher is a reciprocal cipher.
Despite the Vigenère cipher's apparent strength it never became widely used throughout
Europe. The Gronsfeld cipher is a variant created by Count Gronsfeld which is identical to the
Vigenère cipher, except that it uses just 10 different cipher alphabets (corresponding to the digits
0 to 9). The Gronsfeld cipher is strengthened because its key is not a word, but it is weakened
because it has just 10 cipher alphabets. Gronsfeld's cipher did become widely used throughout
Germany and Europe, despite its weaknesses.