Robust Dictionary Attack of Short Simple Substitution Ciphers

Authors:
Edwin Olson
Affiliations:
-
Venue:
Cryptologia
Year:
2007

Citing 4
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Abstract

Simple substitution ciphers are a class of puzzles often found in newspapers, in which each plaintext letter is mapped to a fixed ciphertext letter and spaces are preserved. In this article, a system for automatically solving them is described even when the ciphertext is too short for statistical analysis, and when the puzzle contains non-dictionary words. The approach is based around a dictionary attack; several important performance optimizations are described as well as effective techniques for dealing with non-dictionary words. Quantitative performance results for several variations of the approach and two other implementations are presented.