Chapter 3

Traditional
Symmetric-Key Ciphers

3.1
 plaintext - original message
 ciphertext - coded message
 cipher - algorithm for transforming plaintext to ciphertext
 key - info used in cipher known only to sender/receiver
 encipher (encrypt) - converting plaintext to ciphertext
 decipher (decrypt) - recovering ciphertext from plaintext
 cryptography - study of encryption principles/methods
 cryptanalysis (codebreaking) - study of principles/ methods of
deciphering ciphertext without knowing key
 cryptology - field of both cryptography and cryptanalysis

3.2
 Chapter 3 Objectives

❏ 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

3.3
 3-1 INTRODUCTION

Figure 3.1 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:
3.1.1 Kerckhoff’s Principle
3.1.2 Cryptanalysis
3.1.3 Categories of Traditional Ciphers

3.4
3.1 Continued

Figure 3.1 General idea of symmetric-key cipher

3.5
3.1 Continued

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:

3.6
3.1 Continued

Figure 3.2 Locking and unlocking with the same key

3.7
 3.1.1 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.

3.8
 3.1.2 Cryptanalysis

As cryptography is the science and art of creating secret

codes, cryptanalysis is the science and art of breaking
those codes.

Figure 3.3 Cryptanalysis attacks

3.9
3.1.2 Continued
Ciphertext-Only Attack

Figure 3.4 Ciphertext-only attack

3.10
3.1.2 Continued
Known-Plaintext Attack

Figure 3.5 Known-plaintext attack

3.11
3.1.2 Continued
Chosen-Plaintext Attack

Figure 3.6 Chosen-plaintext attack

3.12
3.1.2 Continued
Chosen-Ciphertext Attack

Figure 3.7 Chosen-ciphertext attack

3.13
3-2 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:

3.2.1 Monoalphabetic Ciphres
3.2.2 Polyalphabetic Ciphers

3.14
 3.2.1 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.

If the plaintext is viewed as a sequence of bits,

then substitution involves replacing plaintext
bit patterns with ciphertext bit patterns

3.15
 3.2.1 Continued

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.

Plaintext : hello Ciphertext: ABNZF

3.16
 3.2.1 Continued
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.

Figure 3.8 Plaintext and ciphertext in Z26

3.17
 3.2.1 Continued
Figure 3.9 Additive cipher

Note

When the cipher is additive, the

plaintext, ciphertext, and key are
integers in Z26.
3.18
 3.2.1 Continued
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:

3.19
 3.2.1 Continued
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:

3.20
 3.2.1 Continued
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.

3.21
 3.2.1 Continued
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.

3.22
3.2.1 Continued
Table 3.1 Frequency of characters in English

Table 3.2 Frequency of diagrams and trigrams

3.23
 3.2.1 Continued
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.

3.24
 3.2.1 Continued
Multiplicative Ciphers

Figure 3.10 Multiplicative cipher

Note

In a multiplicative cipher, the plaintext

and ciphertext are integers in Z26; the
key is an integer in Z26*.
3.25
 3.2.1 Continued

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”.

3.26
3.2.1 Continued
Affine Ciphers

Figure 3.11 Affine cipher

3.27
 3.2.1 Continued

Example 3.09
The affine cipher uses a pair of keys in which the first key is from
Z26* 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).

3.28
 3.2.1 Continued

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.
3.29
 3.2.1 Continued
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.

Figure 3.12 An example key for monoalphabetic substitution cipher

3.30
 3.2.1 Continued

Example 3.13
We can use the key in Figure 3.12 to encrypt the message

The ciphertext is

3.31
 3.2.2 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

3.32
 3.2.2 Continued
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.

3.33
 3.2.2 Continued Playfair Cipher
Figure 3.13 An example of a secret key in the Playfair cipher
• Invented by British scientist Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1854 was the best-known
multiple-letter encryption, which treats diagrams in the plaintext as single units
and translates these units into ciphertext diagrams.
• Based on the use of a 5 × 5 matrix of letters constructed using a keyword
• Used as the standard field system by the British Army in World War I and the U.S.
Army and other Allied forces during World War II.

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

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

3.35
 3.2.2 Continued
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).

3.36
 3.2.2 Continued
Example 3.17

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

Figure 3.14 A Vigenere cipher as a combination of m additive ciphers

3.37
 3.2.2 Continued
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.

Table 3.3
A Vigenere Tableau

3.38
 3.2.2 Continued
Vigenere Cipher (Crypanalysis)

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.

3.39
 3.2.2 Continued
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.

3.40
 3.2.2 Continued
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.

3.41
 3.2.2 Continued
Hill Cipher

Figure 3.15 Key in the Hill cipher

Note

The key matrix in the Hill cipher needs to

have a multiplicative inverse.
3.42
 3.2.2 Continued
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”.

Figure 3.16 Example 3.20

3.43
 3.2.2 Continued
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.

Figure 3.17 Example 3.21

3.44
 3.2.2 Continued
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.
Figure 3.18 Example 3.21

Now she has the key and can break any ciphertext encrypted with
that key.
3.45
 3.2.2 Continued
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.

3.46
3.2.2 Continued
Rotor Cipher

Figure 3.19 A rotor cipher

3.47
3.2.2 Continued
Enigma Machine

Figure 3.20 A schematic of the Enigma machine

3.48
 3-3 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:

3.3.1 Keyless Transposition Ciphers
3.3.2 Keyed Transposition Ciphers
3.3.3 Combining Two Approaches
3.49
 3.3.1 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”.

3.50
 3.3.1 Continued
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”.

3.51
 3.3.1 Continued
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.

3.52
 3.3.2 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.

3.53
 3.3.2 Continued
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

3.54
 3.3.3 Combining Two Approaches

Example 3.26 Figure 3.21

3.55
 3.3.3 Continued
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.

Figure 3.22 Encryption/decryption keys in transpositional ciphers

3.56
3.3.3 Continued

Figure 3.23 Key inversion in a transposition cipher

3.57
 3.3.3 Continued
Using Matrices
We can use matrices to show the encryption/decryption process
for a transposition cipher.

Example 3.27

Figure 3.24 Representation of the key as a matrix in the transposition cipher

3.58
 3.3.3 Continued
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.

Figure 3.24 Representation of the key as a matrix in the transposition cipher

3.59
The Transposition Ciphers are vulnerable to several kinds
of ciphertext-only attacks.
 Statistical Attack
• A transposition cipher does not change the frequency of letters in
the ciphertext; it only recorders the letters.
• The first attack that can be applied is single-letter frequency
analysis.
 Brute-Force Attack
◦ Eve can try all possible keys to decrypt the message. However the
key s can be huge (1! + 2! +3! + … + L!), where L is the length of
the ciphertext.
 Pattern Attack

3.60
 Another attack on the transposition cipher can be called
pattern attack.
 The ciphertext created from a keyed transposition
cipher has some repeated patterns.
 03 08 13 18 01 06 11 16 04 09 14 19 05 10 15 20 02 07 12 17
 We have five group: (03 08 13 18) (01 06 11 16 ) (04 09 14 19) (05
10 15 20) and (02 07 12 17). In all groups, the different
between the two adjacent number is 5. This regularity
can be used to break the cipher.

3.61
3.3.3 Continued
Double Transposition Ciphers
Figure 3.25 Double transposition cipher

3.62
 3-4 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:

3.4.1 Stream Ciphers
3.4.2 Block Ciphers
3.4.3 Combination

3.63
 3.4.1 Stream Ciphers

Call the plaintext stream P, the ciphertext stream C, and

the key stream K.

Figure 3.26 Stream cipher

3.64
 3.4.1 Continued

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.

3.65
 3.4.1 Continued

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.

3.66
 3.4.1 Continued
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.
3.67
 3.4.2 Block 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.
Figure 3.27 Block cipher

3.68
 3.4.2 Continued

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.
3.69
 3.4.3 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.

3.70