Breaking a Caesar Cipher / Vigenère Cipher Encryption for Secure Data Communication
This project had one purpose: creating almost unbreakable encryption by breaking a Caesar – and Vigenère Cipher and getting familiar with how they work. Created a program to encrypt and decrypt messages with a Caesar Cipher and Vigenère Cipher encryption. Breaking these encryptions in these programs will help to identify the factors that contribute to strong and weak encryption systems. A program was created to encrypt messages using Caesar Cipher with a key from 1 to 25 and decrypt messages without knowing the original key by doing different types of “attacks” on the system: a brute force and frequency analysis attack. Created another program to encrypt messages using Vigenère Cipher with a keyword or keyphrase and decrypted messages whilst knowing that original keyword. Tested and compared the two different cyphers when being attacked. This helped identify factors that influenced the strength of encryption and identified the advantages and disadvantages of each Cipher as well as the weaknesses in each attack. Through testing and breaking a Caesar and Vigenère Cipher successfully, multiple factors were identified that influenced the strength of the encryption system. These were used to ensure the new encryption created will be as strong as can be. Comparing the success rate of the different attacks on each Cipher, the similarities, weaknesses and strengths in the Brute Force and Frequency Analysis attacks were found.