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A Vigenère cipher with a completely random (and non-reusable) key which is as long as the message becomes a one-time pad, a theoretically unbreakable cipher. [15] Gilbert Vernam tried to repair the broken cipher (creating the Vernam–Vigenère cipher in 1918), but the technology he used was so cumbersome as to be impracticable. [16]
In cryptanalysis, Kasiski examination (also known as Kasiski's test or Kasiski's method) is a method of attacking polyalphabetic substitution ciphers, such as the Vigenère cipher. [1] [2] It was first published by Friedrich Kasiski in 1863, [3] but seems to have been independently discovered by Charles Babbage as early as 1846. [4] [5]
It describes what is known as a Vigenère cipher, a well-known scheme in cryptography. While Carroll calls this cipher "unbreakable", Friedrich Kasiski had already published in 1863 a volume describing how to break such ciphers and Charles Babbage had secretly found ways to break polyalphabetic ciphers in the previous decade during the Crimean War.
In cryptography, unicity distance is the length of an original ciphertext needed to break the cipher by reducing the number of possible spurious keys to zero in a brute force attack. That is, after trying every possible key , there should be just one decipherment that makes sense, i.e. expected amount of ciphertext needed to determine the key ...
Polyalphabetic ciphers such as the Vigenère cipher prevent a simple frequency analysis by using multiple substitutions. However, more advanced techniques such as the Kasiski examination can still be used to break these ciphers. On the other hand, modern ciphers are designed to withstand much stronger attacks than ciphertext-only attacks.
Nevertheless, Charles Babbage (1791–1871) and later, independently, Friedrich Kasiski (1805–81) succeeded in breaking this cipher. [23] During World War I, inventors in several countries developed rotor cipher machines such as Arthur Scherbius' Enigma, in an attempt to minimise the repetition that had been exploited to break the Vigenère ...
A polyalphabetic cipher is a substitution, using multiple substitution alphabets. The Vigenère cipher is probably the best-known example of a polyalphabetic cipher, though it is a simplified special case. The Enigma machine is more complex but is still fundamentally a polyalphabetic substitution cipher.
As such, even today a Vigenère type cipher should theoretically be difficult to break if mixed alphabets are used in the tableau, if the keyword is random, and if the total length of ciphertext is less than 27.67 times the length of the keyword. [8]