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Transposition Ciphers

Transposition ciphers rearrange the letters of a message to conceal the meaning without substituting characters. This summary describes various transposition cipher techniques including rail fence cipher, columnar transposition using a keyword to determine the column ordering, and double columnar transposition applying the technique twice for increased security. Product ciphers are also introduced, combining substitution and transposition ciphers to create stronger encryption difficult to break with frequency analysis.

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Ahsan Jameel
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449 views18 pages

Transposition Ciphers

Transposition ciphers rearrange the letters of a message to conceal the meaning without substituting characters. This summary describes various transposition cipher techniques including rail fence cipher, columnar transposition using a keyword to determine the column ordering, and double columnar transposition applying the technique twice for increased security. Product ciphers are also introduced, combining substitution and transposition ciphers to create stronger encryption difficult to break with frequency analysis.

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Ahsan Jameel
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Transposition Ciphers

• now consider classical transposition or permutation ciphers


• these hide the message by rearranging the letter order
• without altering the actual letters used
• can recognise these since have the same frequency distribution as the
original text
Transposition cipher techniques

1.Rail Fence Cipher


2.Columnar Transposition
 Simple Columnar Transposition
 Double Columnar Transposition
1. Rail Fence Cipher

• In this method plain text is written downwards on “rails of fence “ , starting a


new column when bottom is reached.
• Algorithm:
1. First write down plain text message as a sequence of diagonals.
2. Read the plain text written in first step as a sequence of rows.
1. Rail Fence Cipher

Example:
Plain text: come home tomorrow

• Cipher text: cmhmtmrooeoeoorw


• The above rail fence cipher is of depth-2
• We can have of any depth….e.g
1. Simple Columnar Transposition
• In this method the message is written in rows of fixed
length and then read out column by column
• Column are selected in some in some scrambled
order.
• The number of columns are defined by the length of
key.
• Algorithm:
1. Write the plain text message row by row in a
rectangle of predefined size.(length of key)
2. Read the message column by column according t the
selected order thus obtained message is a cipher
text.
1. Simple Columnar Transposition

Key: ZEBRAS
plain text: welcome home
Order : 6 3 2 4 1 5

Cipher text: MLOEHCMWEOE


2.Double Columnar Transposition

• Single columnar transposition can be attack by guessing possible column lengths.


• Therefore to make it stronger double transposition is used.
• This is simple columnar transposition technique applied twice.
• Here same key can be used for transposition or two different keys can be used.
2.Double Columnar Transposition

• First apply simple columnar transposition


Key: ZEBRAS
plain text: welcome home
Order : 6 3 2 4 1 5

Cipher text: MLOEHCMWEOE


2.Double Columnar Transposition

Cipher text 1: MLOEHCMWEOE


Order : 6 3 2 4 1 5

Final Cipher Text: COELWEOMMHE


Rail Fence cipher
• write message letters out diagonally over a number of rows
• then read off cipher row by row
• eg. write message out as:
m e m a t r h t g p r y
e t e f e t e o a a t
• giving ciphertext
MEMATRHTGPRYETEFETEOAAT
The twisted path cipher
• This is an elaboration of the letter scrambling technique of the Rail-
fence cipher.
• It uses a rectangular grid or checkerboard of empty spaces.
• The grid/checkerboard can be of your choice, or must be known at
receiver and transmitter side.
• E.g: meet me Thursday night.
• Check/count the letters and make it completely dividable into fix rows
and columns.
• Trace the matrix at a particular path.
• The shape of which is agreed upon by everyone using this algo.
• Is it good to start row wise?
• How about plow path…?
• How about spiral path..?
• This could be make
Harder by combining
the two.
• Lines do not need to be continuous, can be broken too.

Diagonal plow
Row Transposition Ciphers
• This sort of thing would be trivial to cryptanalyze
• a more complex transposition is to write letters of message out in rows
over a specified number of columns
• then reorder the columns according to some key before reading off the
rows
• Attach postponed until two a.m
Key: 3 4 2 1 5 6 7
Plaintext: a t t a c k p
o s t p o n e
d u n t i l t
w o a m x y z
Ciphertext: TTNAAPTMTSUOAODWCOIXKNLYPETZ
• A pure transposition cipher is easily recognized because it has the same
letter frequencies as the original plaintext.
• For the type of columnar transposition just shown, cryptanalysis is fairly
straightforward and involves laying out the ciphertext in a matrix and
playing around with column positions.
• Digram and trigram frequency tables can be useful.
• The transposition cipher can be made significantly more secure by
performing more than one stage of transposition. The result is a more
complex permutation that is not easily reconstructed. Thus, if the foregoing
message is re-encrypted using the same algorithm.
• Encrypted the above encrypted message again using the same algo.
• To visualize the result of this double transposition, designate the letters in
the original plaintext message by the numbers designating their position.
• This will be much difficult to crypt-analyze.
Scrambling with key-words
• Key words are easy to remember rather than the whole code.
Product Ciphers
• A pure transposition cipher is easily recognized because it has the
same letter frequencies as the original plaintext.
• ciphers using substitutions or transpositions are not secure because
of language characteristics
• hence consider using several ciphers in succession to make harder,
but:
• two substitutions make a more complex substitution
• two transpositions make more complex transposition
• but a substitution followed by a transposition makes a new much harder
cipher
• this is bridge from classical to modern ciphers
Summary
• have considered:
• classical cipher techniques and terminology
• monoalphabetic substitution ciphers
• cryptanalysis using letter frequencies
• Playfair cipher
• polyalphabetic ciphers
• transposition ciphers
• product ciphers

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