Abstract
Automatically recognising valid decryptions as a result of ciphertext only cryptanalysis of simple ciphers is not an easy issue and still considered as a taxing problem. In this paper, we present a new universal compression-based approach to the automatic cryptanalysis of transposition ciphers. In particular, we show how a Prediction by Partial Matching (PPM) compression model, a scheme that performs well at many language modelling tasks, can be used to automatically recognise the valid decrypt with a 100 % success rate. We also show how it significantly outperforms another compression scheme, Gzip. In this paper, we propose a full mechanism for the automatic cryptanalysis of transposition ciphers which also automatically adds spaces to decrypted texts, again using a compression-based approach, in order to achieve readability.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MOHESR)-Baghdad University-College of science for women for supporting (sponsoring) this work.
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Al-Kazaz, N.R., Irvine, S.A., Teahan, W.J. (2016). An Automatic Cryptanalysis of Transposition Ciphers Using Compression. In: Foresti, S., Persiano, G. (eds) Cryptology and Network Security. CANS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10052. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48965-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48965-0_3
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