Concept

Vigenère cipher

Summary
The Vigenère cipher (viʒnɛːʁ) is a method of encrypting alphabetic text where each letter of the plaintext is encoded with a different Caesar cipher, whose increment is determined by the corresponding letter of another text, the key. For example, if the plaintext is attacking tonight and the key is OCULORHINOLARINGOLOGY, then *the first letter a of the plaintext is shifted by 14 positions in the alphabet (because the first letter O of the key is the 14th letter of the alphabet, counting from 0), yielding o; *the second letter t is shifted by 2 (because the second letter C of the key means 2) yielding v; *the third letter t is shifted by 20 (U) yielding n, with wrap-around; and so on; yielding the message ovnlqbpvt eoeqtnh. If the recipient of the message knows the key, they can recover the plaintext by reversing this process. The Vigenère cipher is therefore a special case of a polyalphabetic substitution. First described by Giovan Battista Bellaso in 1553, the cipher is easy to
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