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Midterm_Assignment (1)

The midterm assignment for Cryptography and Secure Development involves decrypting two ciphertexts using different methods: Known Plaintext Attack (KPA) and Ciphertext Only Attack (COA). Students must write programs to find encryption keys and original messages, submit a report, and include their code in a zip file by the deadline of March 10, 2025. The assignment emphasizes understanding the decryption methods, the reasoning behind key selection, and the probability of finding multiple keys that yield valid plaintexts.

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3 views

Midterm_Assignment (1)

The midterm assignment for Cryptography and Secure Development involves decrypting two ciphertexts using different methods: Known Plaintext Attack (KPA) and Ciphertext Only Attack (COA). Students must write programs to find encryption keys and original messages, submit a report, and include their code in a zip file by the deadline of March 10, 2025. The assignment emphasizes understanding the decryption methods, the reasoning behind key selection, and the probability of finding multiple keys that yield valid plaintexts.

Uploaded by

jwr15778002438
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Cryptography and Secure Development (CSD) – Midterm Assignment February 20, 2025

Assignment
This exercise involves decrypting two different pieces of ciphertext using two different methods to
find the encryption keys and the original plaintext messages. Please refer to the file:
“studentAssignmentInfo_Moodle.csv” on Moodle to locate your ciphertexts.
All of the secret messages have been encrypted by an 8-rotor encryption machine written in Java.
The source code for the Rotor Machine is available on Moodle as the file
Rotor96Crypto.java. You just need to write the code to use it to search for the various keys.
All the keys have been taken for a file of common passwords called passwords, which is also
available on Moodle.
Once you have finished your exercise, submit a zip file containing your report and your two
programs, called KPA.java (for Known Plaintext Attack) and COA.java (for Ciphertext Only
Attack) using Moodle. Your zip file should have the form lastname_firstname.zip - mine
would be called nguyen_truong.zip.

Deadline Saturday 10th March 2025 at 11.30 p.m. This exercise is worth 20% of your mark
for this module.

Known Plaintext Attack (KPA):

You will be given a chunk of ciphertext, together with the first two characters (i.e., “W” and “e”)
of the plaintext.

(1) Write a program to perform a dictionary attack to find the key. Use this key to decode the rest
of the message. Your report should contain the key you found and the decoded message.

(2) Some of you may find more than one possible keys that produce decoded messages starting
with the first two characters, but only one of them is an English sentence. All of you need to
explain in words why this happens (even though in your specific case, only 1 key is found),
and how you choose the correct key (You do not need to program to choose the right key, just
explain in words).

(3) Calculate the probability of this occurrence (i.e., finding more than one keys that produce
decoded messages starting with the two provided characters).

Ciphertext Only Attack (COA):


You will be given another chunk of ciphertext, as above, but no information about plaintext.
(1) You will need to perform a dictionary attack as before, but now decide whether a key produces
the correct plaintext, given that the plaintext is an English language message.Your report
should contain the key you found and the decoded message.
(2) You should explain and elaborate your method on how you decide whether a decoded message
is the correct plaintext or not.
(3) You will need to perform s o m e experiment to find out how many ciphertext characters
were needed to decode the message unambiguously. You should also include a theoretical
calculation of the number of ciphertext letters needed before unambiguous decoding is possible,
together with the actual number of letters needed for your particular message, as found by your
experiment. Explain the difference.
1 © 2024 Nguyen Truong
Cryptography and Secure Development (CSD) – Midterm Assignment February 20, 2025

My Supporting Code

My code is in a class called Rotor96Crypto, which implements an 8-rotor machine. Each rotor
has 96 characters, the complete ASCII character set. There is one public method:

public String encdec(int mode, String key, String text)

mode is either ENC=1 for Encryption, when text is the plaintext and the ciphertext is returned,
or DEC=2 for Decryption, when text is the ciphertext and the plaintext is returned.

Further support:

https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/cryptography%20hints.html

2 © 2024 Nguyen Truong

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