2 1. An Introduction to Cryptography
in the alphabet. The answer is that he must wrap around to the end of the
alphabet. Thus d is replaced by y, since y is followed by z,a,b,c,d.
This wrap-around effect may be conveniently visualized by placing the al-
phabet abcd...xyz around a circle, rather than in a line. If a second alphabet
circle is then placed within the first circle and the inner circle is rotated five
letters, as illustrated in Figure 1.1, the resulting arrangement can be used
to easily encrypt and decrypt Caesar’s messages. To decrypt a letter, simply
find it on the inner wheel and read the corresponding plaintext letter from
the outer wheel. To encrypt, reverse this process: find the plaintext letter on
the outer wheel and read off the ciphertext letter from the inner wheel. And
note that if you build a cipherwheel whose inner wheel spins, then you are no
longer restricted to always shifting by exactly five letters. Cipher wheels of
this sort have been used for centuries.
2
Although the details of the preceding scene are entirely fictional, and in
any case it is unlikely that a message to a Roman general would have been
written in modern English(!), there is evidence that Caesar employed this
early method of cryptography, which is sometimes called the Caesar cipher
in his honor. It is also sometimes referred to as a shift cipher, since each
letter in the alphabet is shifted up or down. Cryptography, the methodology of
concealing the content of messages, comes from the Greek root words kryptos,
meaning hidden,
3
and graphikos, meaning writing. The modern scientific study
of cryptography is sometimes referred to as cryptology.
In the Caesar cipher, each letter is replaced by one specific substitute
letter. However, if Bob encrypts a message for Alice
4
using a Caesar cipher
and allows the encrypted message to fall into Eve’s hands, it will take Eve
very little time to decrypt it. All she needs to do is try each of the 26 possible
shifts.
Bob can make his message harder to attack by using a more complicated
replacement scheme. For example, he could replace every occurrence of a
by z and every occurrence of z by a, every occurrence of b by y and every
occurrence of y by b, and so on, exchanging each pair of letters c ↔ x,...,
m ↔ n.
This is an example of a simple substitution cipher, that is, a cipher in which
each letter is replaced by another letter (or some other type of symbol). The
Caesar cipher is an example of a simple substitution cipher, but there are
many simple substitution ciphers other than the Caesar cipher. In fact, a
2
A cipher wheel with mixed up alphabets and with encryption performed using different
offsets for different parts of the message is featured in a 15
th
century monograph by Leon
Batista Alberti [58].
3
The word cryptic, meaning hidden or occult, appears in 1638, while crypto- as a prefix
for concealed or secret makes its appearance in 1760. The term cryptogram appears much
later, first occurring in 1880.
4
In cryptography, it is traditional for Bob and Alice to exchange confidential messages
and for their adversary Eve, the eavesdropper, to intercept and attempt to read their mes-
sages. This makes the field of cryptography much more personal than other areas of math-
ematics and computer science, whose denizens are often X and Y !