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In cryptography, a Caesar cipher, also known as Caesar's cipher, the shift cipher, Caesar's code, or Caesar shift, is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet .
The Caesar cipher is an Affine cipher with a = 1 since the encrypting function simply reduces to a linear shift. The Atbash cipher uses a = −1 . Considering the specific case of encrypting messages in English (i.e. m = 26 ), there are a total of 286 non-trivial affine ciphers, not counting the 26 trivial Caesar ciphers.
The idea of an iterative cipher using repeated application of simple non-commutating operations producing diffusion and confusion goes as far back as 1945, to the then-secret version of C. E. Shannon's work "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems"; [4] Shannon was inspired by mixing transformations used in the field of dynamical systems theory ...
In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment .
In computing, a linear-feedback shift register (LFSR) is a shift register whose input bit is a linear function of its previous state. The most commonly used linear function of single bits is exclusive-or (XOR). Thus, an LFSR is most often a shift register whose input bit is driven by the XOR of some bits of the overall shift register value.
The secret key is mixed in at every stage so that an attacker cannot precalculate what the cipher does. None of this happens when a simple one-stage scramble is based on a key. Input patterns would flow straight through to the output. It might look random to the eye but analysis would find obvious patterns and the cipher could be broken.
ROT13 is a simple letter substitution cipher that replaces a letter with the 13th letter after it in the Latin alphabet. ROT13 is a special case of the Caesar cipher which was developed in ancient Rome, used by Julius Caesar in the 1st century BC. [1] An early entry on the Timeline of cryptography.
In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encrypting in which units of plaintext are replaced with the ciphertext, in a defined manner, with the help of a key; the "units" may be single letters (the most common), pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth.