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Monoalphabetic Substitution Ciphers

Monoalphabetic substitution ciphers are the most common form of cipher where each letter of the plaintext is replaced with another letter or symbol according to a fixed cipher alphabet. There are many possible monoalphabetic ciphers as each letter can be substituted for any other symbol. Examples of generating monoalphabetic ciphers include using a keyword to mix the letters of the plain and cipher alphabets or using columnar transposition with a keyword to determine the cipher alphabet. While simple monoalphabetic ciphers are weak and easy to break, they were an important early step in the development of cryptography.

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Sourav Debnath
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509 views3 pages

Monoalphabetic Substitution Ciphers

Monoalphabetic substitution ciphers are the most common form of cipher where each letter of the plaintext is replaced with another letter or symbol according to a fixed cipher alphabet. There are many possible monoalphabetic ciphers as each letter can be substituted for any other symbol. Examples of generating monoalphabetic ciphers include using a keyword to mix the letters of the plain and cipher alphabets or using columnar transposition with a keyword to determine the cipher alphabet. While simple monoalphabetic ciphers are weak and easy to break, they were an important early step in the development of cryptography.

Uploaded by

Sourav Debnath
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Monoalphabetic Substitution Ciphers

Substitution ciphers are probably the most common form of cipher. They work by replacing each letter of the
plaintext (and sometimes punctuation marks and spaces) with another letter (or possibly even a random
symbol).
A monoalphabetic substitution cipher, also known as a simple substitution cipher, relies on a fixed replacement
structure. That is, the substitution is fixed for each letter of the alphabet. Thus, if "a" is encrypted to "R", then
every time we see the letter "a" in the plaintext, we replace it with the letter "R" in the ciphertext.
A simple example is where each letter is encrypted as the next letter in the alphabet: "a simple message"
becomes "B TJNQMF NFTTBHF". In general, when performing a simple substitution manually, it is easiest
to generate the ciphertext alphabet first, and encrypt by comparing this to the plaintext alphabet. The table
below shows how one might choose to, and we will, lay them out for this example.

The ciphertext alphabet for the cipher where you replace each letter by the next letter in the alphabet

There are many different monoalphabetic substitution ciphers, in fact infinitely many, as each letter can be
encrypted to any symbol, not just another letter.
The history of simple substitution ciphers can be traced back to the very earliest civilizations, and for a long
time they were more than adequate for the purposes for which they were needed. By today's standards they
are very weak, and incredibly easy to break, but they were a very important step in developing cryptography.

A monoalphabetic substitution is a cipher in which each occurrence of a plaintext symbol is replaced by a


corresponding ciphertext symbol to generate ciphertext. The key for such a cipher is a table of the
correspondence or a function from which the correspondence is computed.
Example: An affine cipher E(x) = (ax + b) MOD 26 is an example of a monoalphabetic substitution.
There are other ways to “generate” a monoalphabetic substitution.

Alphabet Mixing via a Keyword


A keyword or key phrase can be used to mix the letters to generate the cipher alphabet.
Example: If the keyword is ANDREW DICKSON WHITE, then the cipher alphabet is given by
Plain: 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
Cipher: A N D R E W I C K S O H T B F G J L M P Q U V X Y Z
Do you think it is a problem that there are 5 collisions (a plaintext letter being substituted for itself) in this
substitution? (Answer: It depends.)

Perhaps a better keyword is EZRA CORNELL:


Plain: 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
Cipher: E Z R A C O N L B D F G H I J K M P Q S T U V W X Y
Note that neither of these substitutions are generated by an affine cipher.

Alphabet Mixing via a Columnar Transposition

The letters from the keyword form the headings of the columns, and the remaining letters of the alphabet fill in order
in the rows below. Mixing is achieved by transcribing columns.

Example: If the keyword is CORNELL, then write

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

so that transcribing columns left-to-right gives the substitution

plain 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
cipher C A I S Y O B J T Z R D K U N F M V E G P W L H Q X
For instance, FAR ABOVE CAYUGA’S WATERS is enciphered as OCVCA NWYIC QPBCE LCGYE.
Note that this substitution is also not generated by an affine cipher.

SR.NO Monoalphabetic Cipher Polyalphabetic Cipher

1 Monoalphabetic cipher is one where each Polyalphabetic cipher is any cipher based
symbol in plain text is mapped to a fixed on substitution, using multiple substitution
symbol in cipher text. alphabets.

2 The relationship between a character in the The relationship between a character in the
plain text and the characters in the cipher text plain text and the characters in the cipher
is one-to-one. text is one-to-many.

3 Each alphabetic character of plain text is Each alphabetic character of plain text can
mapped onto a unique alphabetic character of be mapped onto ‘m’ alphabetic characters
a cipher text. of a cipher text.

4 A stream cipher is a monoalphabetic cipher if A stream cipher is a polyalphabetic cipher


the value of key does not depend on the if the value of key does depend on the
position of the plain text character in the position of the plain text character in the
plain text stream. plain text stream.

5 It includes additive, multiplicative, affine and It includes autokey, Playfair, Vigenère,


monoalphabetic substitution cipher. Hill, one-time pad, rotor, and Enigma
cipher.
SR.NO Monoalphabetic Cipher Polyalphabetic Cipher

6 It is a simple substitution cipher. It is multiple substitutions cipher.

7 Monoalphabetic Cipher is described as a Polyalphabetic Cipher is described as


substitution cipher in which the same fixed substitution cipher in which plain text
mappings from plain text to cipher letters letters in different positions are enciphered
across the entire text are used. using different crypto alphabets.

8 Monoalphabetic ciphers are not that strong as Polyalphabetic ciphers are much stronger.
compared to polyalphabetic cipher.

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