By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)

Table of Contents
1- Substitution Cipher ............................................................................................................................. 2
1.1 Classical Monoalphabetic cipher ............................................................................................ 2
1.1.1 Ceaser Cipher .................................................................................................................. 2
1.1.2 Keyword Cipher ............................................................................................................... 3
1.1.3 Affine Cipher ................................................................................................................... 4
1.1.4 Multiliteral Cipher ........................................................................................................... 5
1.1.5 Simple Substitution ......................................................................................................... 6
1.1.6 Summary ......................................................................................................................... 6
1.2 Classical Polyalphabetic Cipher ............................................................................................... 7
1.2.1 Vigenere Cipher............................................................................................................... 7
1.2.2 Autokey Cipher................................................................................................................ 9
1.3 Polygraphic Ciphers................................................................................................................. 9
1.3.1 Playfair Cipher ................................................................................................................. 9
1.3.2 Hill Cipher ...................................................................................................................... 11
1.3.4 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 12
2 - Transposition Cipher: ....................................................................................................................... 12
2.1 Permutation Cipher............................................................................................................... 13
2.2 Column Permutation Cipher ................................................................................................. 14
2.3 Double-Transposition Cipher ................................................................................................ 15
2.4 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 15
References ........................................................................................................................................ 16
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)
1- Substitution and transposition cipher:

In cryptography there are two techniques we use to implement in the secret

key cryptography system. Substitution cipher and transposition cipher.

Substitution Cipher
In substitution every letters of plain text are replaced by another letter , number or
symbol , each letter preserve its position but it changes the identity of the letter for
example Ceaser cipher.
Substitution ciphers are mainly divided in two parts, Monoalphabetic cipher
and Polyalphabetic cipher.

1.1 Classical Monoalphabetic cipher

one of the earliest monoalpabet ciphers was developed by the Greed writer Polybius
around 200 B.C . The cipher is called a Poybius square because it arranges the letters
of the alphabet in a square with column and row numbered.
A Monoalphabetic cipher is a substitution cipher which means every letter is
substituted by one cipher text character. Examples of Monoalphabetic ciphers are
Ceaser cipher, Affine cipher, Multilateral cipher and simple substitution.

1.1.1 Ceaser Cipher

The Ceaser Cipher also we call it shift is cipher is one of the simplest and oldest
technique for encrypting messages and firstly it was used by a Roman man Julius
Caesar, he was using it to communicate secretly (Stinson , 1995).
Ceaser cipher is substitution cipher, we use Ceaser ciper with a modulus of 2
to encrypt the plain text message by setting up a relationship between
alphabetic letters and the modulo of 26: first we write the alphabet letters and
we give them a value as follow :
A =0, B =1, C=3, ………… Z =25. And we are going to use this correspondence in our
examples.

A B C D E F G H I J
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
K L M N O P Q R S T
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
U V W X Y Z
20 21 22 23 24 25

We use these formula to encrypt and decrypt the messages using Ceaser Cipher
Encryption: Ek(X) = x + K mod 26
Decryption: Dk(y) = y – K mod 26
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)
Example 1.1
Suppose they key for a Ceaser Cipher is K =11 , and the plain text is
We will meet at midnight.
Firstly we convert the plain text to integer numbers using the above table we have and we
get w = 22, e = 4.
Our final result after converting is
22 4 22 8 11 11 12 4 4 19 0 19 12 8 3 13 8 6 7 19
After converting we use the formula for encrypting the message.
Encryption: Ek(X) = x + K mod 26
Ek(X) = 22 + 11 mod 26 = 7
Ek(X) = 4 + 11 mod 26 =15
And after we do this process for every single character we will get
7 15 7 19 22 22 23 15 15 4 11 4 22 19 14 24 19 17 18 4
And finally we substitute the letters according to its value from the table.
7 = H 15 = P …..4 =E
Our Cipher text is as follow

HPHTWWXPPELEXTOYTRSE
To decrypt the encrypted message we simply convert the cipher text to integer number
from the table given and we use the following formula.
Decryption: Dk(y) = y – K mod 26
7 = H 15 = P …..4 =E
Dk(y) = 7 – 11 mod 26 = 22
Dk(y) = 15 – 11 mod 26 = 4
We continue until we reach to the last letter and then simply substitute them from the
table.
Complexity of Ceaser Cipher is 25! and can be broken by brute force attack .

1.1.2 Keyword Cipher

As we saw in the previous type of cipher (Ceaser cipher) was easy to break because it is
only 25! , with the help of brute force attack we can break the cipher. So we need a
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)
more powerful technique than the Ceaser Cipher . since the Ceaser Cipher is easy to
break by trying all 25 keys , any replacement substitution cipher should have more keys.
The type of cipher that satisfies this demand is the keyword cipher. A keyword cipher is
can be build using two steps (Spillman, 2005).
1- Choose a keyword – select any keyword you want, if the keyword has any repeated
character, drop all but the first occurrence. For example if the selected keyword is
“letter” then use “lter”.
2- Write the selected keyword below the alphabet and fill the rest of the space with the
remaining alphabet letters in the respective order.

For example , we select keyword “magicnet” , the two alphabets can be written as follows :
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
m a g I c n e t b d f h j k l o p q r s u v w x y z
These two alphabets define the keyword substitution pattern . with this keyword the
plaintext “a” is always replaced by m and “b” is always replaced by “a” .
For example let’s encipher “Help me “
we will have “tcho jc” .
Variation of this type of cipher were very popular in 14th-century in Europe . By 15th even
today, monoalphabetic keyword type is still around but only the new learners are using it.

Decryption
deciphering of keyword cipher is very easy what you need to know is the keyword
after writing keyword write the remaining alphabet letter and write a full alphabet
letter then just compare the matching .

1.1.3 Affine Cipher

Another special case of the substitution cipher is the Affine Cipher. In the affine cipher
the letters of alphabet are assigned numbers from 0 to 25 for example, a =0, b =1 and z
= 25. They key to affine cipher is two numbers (a,b) each of them should be between 0
and 25 (Spillman, 2005) . The GCD of “a” and 26 must be 1. For example a = 4 will not
work because 2 divides both “a” and 26. However if we take 5 it will work because 1 is
the only number that divides both 5 and 26 .Now, let’s p the number of plain text letter
and c the number of the ciphertext letter. Then, the affine cipher for these two
numbers is as follow.

C = ap + b (mod26)
For example we choose the key (7,3) . as we 7 is going to work because gcd (7,26) is 1.
Lets encipher the word “dot” using affine method. First we write the letters
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)
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
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

As we see D = 3, O = 14 and T = 19.

We use the formula , C = ap + b (mod26)
C(D) = 7 X 3 + 3 mod 26 = 24 mod 26 = 24 , which is “y”.
C(O) = 7 X 14 + 3 mod 26 = 98 mod 26 = 23, which is “x”.
C(T) = 7 X 19 + 3 mod 26 = 133 mod 26 = 6 , which is “g”.

So with the given key and plain text , our ciphertext is “yxg”.

Decryption: to decrypt affine cipher we will use this formula

P = a-1 (c-b) mod 26

First we try to find the a-1 then we take the mod of a-1 mod 26 after finding the result we
multiply it with (c-b) and we take the mod again to find our result . lets decrypt the previous
example we solved .
Our ciphertext is “YXG” y = 24 , x = 23 , g = 6
P(Y) = a-1 (c-b) mod 26 = a-1 mod 26 = 7-1 mod 26 = 15 , now 15 (c-b) mod 26
15 (24-3) mod 26 = 315 mod 26 = 3 which is “d”
P(O) = 15(23-3) mod 26 = 14 which is “o”
P(T) = 15(6-3) mod 6 = 45 mod 26 = 19 which is “t”

1.1.4 Multiliteral Cipher

A multiliteral cipher is another type of monoalphabetic cipher, it tries to do
something different than other monoalphabetical ciphers. it replace each plaintext
letter with a pair of letters (Spillman, 2005) . The result that we get for our
plaintext is twice as larger as the plaintext and looks strange. The multiliteral
cipher is a 5 X 5 matrix. We choose a keyword without any repetition and the
letters of “I” and “j” occupies the same cell. For example if the keyword is “codes”
then the matrix will look like.

c o d e s
c a b c d e
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)
o f g h i/j k
d i m n o p
e q r s t u
s v w x y z

Let’s solve an example using multiliteral cipher; we want to encipher the “hat”
We go the table we created and then check every letter for h, we find the letters that
intersect in “h” so h = OD, a = cc, and t = ee.
Finally our cipher text is “od cc ee”.
Decryption
The decoding process is very simple, a reverse look up to the matrix. To decrypt the cipher
text “od cc ee” we find the intersection of “od” and its h “cc” is a and “ee” is “t”.

1.1.5 Simple Substitution

Another popular cryptosystem is simple substitution. Simple substitution ciphers
same to Caesar cipher use a single mapping from plaintext to ciphertext characters
that is the same plaintext will have the same ciphertext (Stinson , 1995) . This
characteristic is always not good in cryptography from the security point of view.
Polyalphabetic cipher solves this problem by using multiple substitutions. In this
cryptosystem we just randomly assign a letter to the ordered alphabet letters.
For example
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
x n y a h p o g z q w b t s f l r c v m u e k j d I
A key for the simple substitution cipher just consist of a permutation of the 26
letters. The number of this permutation is 26! , which is more than 4 X 10 26 .
Decryption
The decryption Is very simple we just write the inverse permutation. For example for
any x we write a instead of it .
This cryptosystem can be broken using frequency analyse, and because of the
language characteristic and redundancy in the letters.

1.1.6 Summary
Despite there is a number of classical monoalphabetic ciphers that have been for
use for a very long time. However, all of them have very common weaknesses and
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)
that is the level of complexity because using the substation is very low and can be
broken very easily.

1.2 Classical Polyalphabetic Cipher

Polyalphabetic cipher is a substitution cipher which each plaintext character is
represented by more than one ciphertext character. For example a plain text “a”
might appear as a ciphertext “g” one time and as ciphertext “k” next time or a
ciphertext “l” may represent a plaintext “f” and “y”(Spillman , 2005) .
The 15th-century architect, Leon Battista Alberti, is thought to be the first to
suggest the use of a polyalphabetic technique. He designed a cipher disk on which
the outer portion of the disk rotates around the inner portion. The inner process
contained the plaintext alphabet and the outer ring contained the ciphertext
alphabet.
The polyalphabetic cryptosystem that were introduced in 15th century had to
compete with the ciphers that become the standard for encryption in the Middle
Ages.

1.2.1 Vigenere Cipher

According to Spillman, The Vigenere Cipher is a popular example of a polyalphabetic
cipher. The Vigenere cipher was developed in the mid-1500c by Blaise de Vigenere . It was
lost for a very long time until it was rediscovered in the 19 th century. The Vigenere cipher
became one of the most popular polyalphabetic ciphers in history and yet it stands as the
main example of polyalphabetic cipher (2005).
The Vigenere cryptosystem is based on the keyword, but we write the key word
above the plaintext and each plaintext is associated with a keyword letter. For example if
the keyword is “help” and the plaintext is “this is the plain text” , then it is written as follow .
Help help help help he
This isth epla inte xt
Every plaintext is paired with one keyword. for example, for the plaintext the letter ”t” is
paired with “h” at the end of plaintext the letter “t” is paired with “e”. we will use the
following table to encrypt and decrypt our messages using the Vigenere cipher .
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)

In the above table the row based Alphabet (vertical one) is used as the key and the column
based alphabet at the top of table is used as plain text. We will encrypt the above message
we gave. Plain text is “This is the plain text” and the keyword is “help”.
Help help help help he
This isth epla inte xt
To encrypt the message we need to find the intersection between the keyword in plaintext
in the table for example for plain text “t” and keyword “h” the intersection is “a” and for
letter “h” keyword “e” the cipher text is “l” after finished the process we are going to have
the following result .
Keyword : Help help help help he
Plain text : This isth epla inte xt
Ciphertext: alth pxew lswp pret ex
Decryption
For the decryption we use the same table , keyword and our ciphertext , the only difference
is we do not take the intersection between the keyword and plain text but we need to find
the intersection between the keyword and the ciphertext from the given table . for example
if we want to find the intersection between keyword “h” and ciphertext “a” and its “t” we
do continue the process until we get the result .
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)
1.2.2 Autokey Cipher
The problem with the Vigenere cipher was repetition of the key and it can give a very
good opportunity to attackers to find the repetition and decipher the cipher text.in
Autokey cipher the keyword is used only once and we use the plaintext for the
remaining letters of the plaintext as a key.
This idea was published in 1550, by Girolamo Cardano a physician and
mathematician just to avoid the weaknesses that we had in Vigenere cipher keyword
repeat itself. Let’s give an example using the auto key cipher. For the encryption and
decryption of this cipher we still use the standard Vigenere table. For example the
keyword is “alice” and the plaintext is” I hope this works better than...” we will have,
Keyword : a l i c e i h o p e t h i s w o r k s b e t t e …….
Plaintext: i h o p e t h i s w o r k s b e t t e r t h a n..
Ciphertext: I s w r I b o w h a h y s k x s k d w s x a t r
While this Autokey seems to be a good cipher system to replace the Vigenere
but it has a major downside. If the sender mistakenly records a wrong ciphertext
everything is going to be unreadable to the receiver.
Decryption
Decryption of the Autokey cipher is exactly like Vigenere cipher that we have already
discussed about the only difference is the repetition of the key that we use plain text
for the remaining letters in Autokey method.

1.3 Polygraphic Ciphers

As we saw till now both the monoalphabetic and polyalphabetic ciphers work with
single letters. Any cipher that enciphers one character at a time is called monographic.
A polygraphic cipher, work with a groups of character (Mao, 2003) .
The problem with polygraphic ciphers is determining how to map groups of
plaintext letters into groups of ciphertext letters.

1.3.1 Playfair Cipher

Playfair cipher is a diagraph substitution cipher. The playfair cipher was developed
by Charles Wheatstone during 1800s but bears the name of Baron Playfair who
promoted the use of the cipher (Spillman , 2005) .
Cipher is not only more challenging in compare with standard
monoalphabetic cipher but it is very easy to implement, it is based on keyword that
is written in a 5 X 5 matrix and we drop any repeated letter and the letter “j”
because “I’ and “j” are accepted as the same letter because we have 5 X 5 matrix .
First we write the keyword in we fill the remaining part with alphabets letters
respectively. For example if the keyword is cryptography, we construct the square as
follow:
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)
First we filter the key and remove the repeated letter.
CRYPTOGAHY
c r y p t
o g a h b
d e f I k
l m n q s
u v w x z
Rules for enciphering
 if pair is repeated insert “x” example yellow , encrypt it as “ye lx lo wx”
 If the two plaintext letters appear in the same row in the table, choose the letter to
the right.
 If the two plaintext letters appear in the same column in the table, choose the
character below.
 If the two plaintext letters appear in different rows in columns, then they form two
points of a square – choose the character on the other two points.

Before applying these rules as mentioned, the plaintext has to be pre-processed to remove
the letter “j” and any double letters. This is done by replacing all “j” with “I” and placing a
filter letter (usually “x” or “q”) between the repeated letters.
Let’s solve an example; we want to encrypt the text “this text is encrypted using playfair”
with the cryptography.
First we filter the key and remove the repeated letter.
CRYPTOGAHY
c r y p t
o g a h b
d e f I k
l m n q s
u v w x z
It is the time to make pair of the plain text as follow:
Plaintext: th is te xt is en cr yp te du si ng pl ay fa ir
Ciphertext: ph kq yk zp kq fn ry pt rk lc qk ma cq fa nf ep
The complexity of this cipher is 26 X 26 = 676 diagram .
Decryption
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)
The process of deciphering is in a way the reverse process for enciphering. Start with
filtering keyword and create the matrix, then filter the ciphertext and do the following
steps.

 if pair is repeated insert “x” example yellow , encrypt it as “ye lx lo wx”

 If the two ciphertext letters appear in the same row in the table, choose the letter to
the left.
 If the two ciphertext letters appear in the same column in the table, choose the
character above.
 If the two plaintext letters appear in different rows in columns, then they form two
points of a square – choose the character on the other two points.

1.3.2 Hill Cipher

The Playfair cipher highlights the usefulness of encrypting multiple letters at a time.
Once Playfair cipher became well known, cryptologists started to create ciphers for
trigram and larger. They failed due to the difficulty of maintaining a three-
dimensional table. The Hill cipher was invented in 1929 by Lester S.Hill .it works on a
block of m plaintext letters to produce a block of m ciphertext letters. Each plaintext
character is assigned a numerical value usually a=0, b=1 …z=25.the numerical values
of each letter in the block are combined to create a new set of numerical values
represent the ciphertext letters. For example if m=2, we can write a plaintext
element as x =(x1, x2) and a ciphertext element as y = (y1,y2). Y1 would be a linear
combination of x1 and x2.
Y1 = 11x1 + 3x2
Y2 = 8x1 + 7x2
We can write it in a matrix notation as follow:

(y1,y2) = (x1,x2) ( )

In general we will take an m x m matrix K as our key .

K=

Now let’s solve an example using Hill cipher:

Suppose the key is

K= ( )
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)
For example we want to encrypt the plaintext “july”. We have two elements of
plaintext to encrypt: (9, 20) (j=9, u=20) and (11, 24) (l=11, y=24). We encrypt it as
follow:

(9, 20) ( ) = (99+60, 72+140) = (159, 212) mod 26 = (3, 4)

(11, 24) ( ) = (121+72, 88 +168) = (193, 256) mod 26 = (11, 22)

Then we write the equivalent letter to the numbers we got 3 =d 4=e 11=l and 22 = w
so our cipher text is “DELW”.
Decryption
For the decryption first we need to computer the inverse of the Key.

( )-1 = adj = ( )

We need to add 26 to the negative values to get a number between 0 and 25 , and
we get .

( )-1 = ( )

Our cipher text was DELW, (D,E = 3,4) and (L,W = 11,22)

(3,4) ( ) = (9 ,20 )

(11, 22) ( ) = (11, 24)

(9, 20, 11, 24) = july and it was our plain text.

1.3.4 Summary
In short the polygraphic cipher is a cipher in which two or more characters are
enciphered at a time. The result it a cipher that is resistant to single frequency
analysis as well as introducing other problems for the cryptanalysis. However , the
cipher is not secure enough and can be attacked easily using known-plain text
attack .

2 - Transposition Cipher:
in transposition cipher does not substitute the letter to another letter or symbols
instead of it changes the position of the letters , in transposition cipher each letter
preserve its identity but changes its location . The goal of the developer of such a
cipher is to come up with a way in which the pieces can be put in order easily if you
know the key.
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)
2.1 Permutation Cipher
Christensen says, a simple implementation of a transposition cipher is called
permutation cipher. This is much like shuffling a deck of cards in order to randomize
the deal. In this case the plaintext is divided into blocks of some fixed length d and a
permutation function f of the integers 1 to d is selected (2005).
Consider the following plaintext message.
Monoalphabetic unilateral substitution system
We will encipher it using a permutation that divides the message into 5-letter blocks,
monoa lphab eticu nilat erals ubsti tutio nsyst em
Because the numbers of the letters in the plaintext message is not a multiple of 5,
the last block must be padded
monoa lphab eticu nilat erals ubsti tutio nsyst emxxx
Then we rearrange the letters of the blocks according to the following permutation:
1 2 3 4 5
4 5 1 3 2
So for our first five letter
m o n o a
1 2 3 4 5
Becomes
o a m n o
4 5 1 3 2
After finishing the process for all the blocks we will have :
Plaintext : monoa lphab eticu nilat erals ubsti tutio nsyst emxxx
Ciphertext: oamno ablhp cueit atnli lsear tiusb onttu stnys xxexm

Decryption
For decrypting of permutation cipher we simply use the key for example the
ciphertext of first block of our previous example was “ oamno “ and the key is 4 5 1 3
2.

o a m n o
4 5 1 3 2
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Simply we can see that the first letter “ o “ postion is the 4th and “a” is the 5th and
“m” is 1 so we rewrite it .
Plaintext : Monoa

2.2 Column Permutation Cipher

The column permutation cipher is a simple cipher technique, and it’s very easy to
use. It mixes up the plain text to get the cipher text, visit www. crypto.interactive-
maths.com.
Despite it is a weak cipher but if we combine it with other cipher like
substations it is going to better.
We can choose a keyword for column transposition cipher and the length of
key will determine, the number of columns that we are going to have .for example
let’s take the word “crypto” as our key word and we try to encipher the following
message.
Defend the east wall of the castle
We write the message in this way (the keyword here is crypto ):
1 4 6 3 5 2
C R Y P T O
d e f e n d
t h e e a s
t w a l l o
f t h e c a
s t l e x x

Starting with the column headed by "C", our ciphertext begins "DTTFS" from
this column. We now move to the column headed by "O", and move in alphabetical
order.
our ciphertext is “ dttfsdsoaxeeleeehwttnalcxfeahl “

Decryption
Firstly write out the keyword, and then find the length of rows divide the ciphertext
length to the number of key words . for our example the length of the ciphertext is
30 / 6 = 5 it means we have five rows
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)
Next we start filling the matrix in alphabetical order starting from “c” until to the last
one .
our ciphertext is “ dttfsd soaxee leeeh wttnal cxfeahl “
we fill the column in alphabetical order starting from “c” to “y “ . the keyword start
with letter “c” so we start with “c” After the first column is written we can continue
to the end and we will get the result .
1 4 6 3 5 2
C R Y P T O
d e f e n d
t h e e a s
t w a l l o
f t h e c a
s t l e x x

2.3 Double-Transposition Cipher

A double column-transposition cipher works just as the name implies. the plaintext is
encrypted using a column transposition cipher and the resulting cipher text is
enciphered again using a column transposition . They keyword may be the same for
both transpositions visit, practicalcryptography.com.

2.4 Summary
In this part we have seen different approach to encryption the transposition cipher.
Instead of substituting one letter or group of letters for another this approach
rearranges the letters in the plaintext. The key to this type of cipher is usually a
geometric figue. The plaintext is written into the figure in one order and read out in
a different order.
By : Jawid Arabzada (IIUM)

References

Christensen. (2015). Permutation Ciphers, 1-5. doi: MAT/CSC 483.2007,spring.

Mao .(2003). Modern Cryptography: Theory and Practice. New Jersey ,US: Prentice Hall
PTR .

Spillman.(2005). Classical and Contemporary Cryptography. Tacoma Washington: Pearson

Education.

Stinson . (1995).Cryptography Theory and Practice. US: Crc Press, Inc.

http://crypto.interactive-maths.com/columnar-transposition-
cipher.html

http://practicalcryptography.com/ciphers/columnar-transposition-
cipher/