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Concept
Transposition cipher
Summary
In cryptography, a transposition cipher (also known as a permutation cipher) is a method of encryption which scrambles the positions of characters (transposition) without changing the characters themselves. Transposition ciphers reorder units of plaintext (typically characters or groups of characters) according to a regular system to produce a ciphertext which is a permutation of the plaintext. They differ from substitution ciphers, which do not change the position of units of plaintext but instead change the units themselves. Despite the difference between transposition and substitution operations, they are often combined, as in historical ciphers like the ADFGVX cipher or complex high-quality encryption methods like the modern Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
Plaintexts can be rearranged into a ciphertext using a key, scrambling the order of characters like the shuffled pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The resulting message is hard to decipher without the key because there are many ways the characters can be arranged.
For example, the plaintext "THIS IS WIKIPEDIA" could be encrypted to "TWDIP SIHII IKASE". To decipher the encrypted message without the key, an attacker could try to guess possible words and phrases like DIATHESIS, DISSIPATE, WIDTH, etc., but it would take them some time to reconstruct the plaintext because there are many combinations of letters and words. By contrast, someone with the key could reconstruct the message easily:
C I P H E R Key
1 4 5 3 2 6 Sequence (key letters in alphabetical order)
T H I S I S Plaintext
W I K I P E
D I A * * *
Ciphertext by column:
#1 TWD, #2 IP, #3 SI, #4 HII, #5 IKA, #6 SE
Ciphertext in groups of 5 for readability:
TWDIP SIHII IKASE
In practice, a message this short and with a predictable keyword would be broken almost immediately with cryptanalysis techniques. Transposition ciphers have several vulnerabilities (see the section on "Detection and cryptanalysis" below), and small mistakes in the encipherment process can render the entire ciphertext meaningless.
Official source
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