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ECW21 UoS Cipher Challenge Student Worksheet

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30 views

ECW21 UoS Cipher Challenge Student Worksheet

Uploaded by

geetabenmavani03
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Caesar Cipher Exercises

Exercise 1: Decryption

A plaintext was encrypted with a Caesar cipher with a shift of 7 (A maps


to H). The resulting ciphertext is:
Kvu'a qbknl h ivvr if paz jvcly
What was the original plaintext?

Exercise 2: Brute Force

Use Brute Force to crack the following Caesar ciphertext, to identify the
person encoded:
KRPCFIJNZWK
Hint: Brute force is best for this question, because there are not enough
letters for a frequency analysis (most letters appear once, with only K
appearing twice)

Surrey Centre for Cyber Security


Exercise 3: Spotting Patterns

A plaintext was encrypted with a Caesar cipher, resulting in the


following:
DOOV ZHOO WKDW HQGV ZHOO
Can you work out what the plaintext was?

Hint: Note that there are several occurrences of “OO” appearing within
the enciphered words. This must correspond to a double letter in the
plaintext. Only some letters in English can be doubled up, so you can
try some guesses.

Exercise 4: Frequency Analysis:

A plaintext had its punctuation and spaces removed, and was then
encrypted with a Caesar cipher. The resulting ciphertext is:
cxknxawxccxkncqjcrbcqnzdnbcrxwfruurjvbqjtnbynjan
Use frequency analysis to identify which ciphertext characters are most
common.
What was the original plaintext?
Hint: In plaintext English, the most common letter is E. Using frequency
analysis, a sensible guess would be to try a shift which maps E to one of
the most common ciphertext characters.

Surrey Centre for Cyber Security


Exercise 5:
Use any method (brute force, spotting patterns, frequency analysis, or
invent your own) to decode the following encoded with a Caesar Cipher.
Adhz iypsspn, huk aol zspaof avclz
Kpk nfyl huk nptisl pu aol dhil:
Hss tptzf dlyl aol ivyvnvclz,
Huk aol tvtl yhaoz vbanyhil.
Ildhyl aol Qhiilydvjr, tf zvu!
Aol qhdz aoha ipal, aol jshdz aoha jhajo!
Ildhyl aol Qbiqbi ipyk, huk zobu
Aol mybtpvbz Ihuklyzuhajo!

If you want to use Frequency Analysis, here are the frequencies of the
ciphertext characters:
Code Count Frequency
L 25 12.195 %
A 21 10.244 %
H 19 9.268 %
O 16 7.805 %
I 14 6.829 %
Z 12 5.854 %
Y 12 5.854 %
P 10 4.878 %
U 9 4.390 %
V 9 4.390 %
D 8 3.902 %
K 8 3.902 %
S 7 3.415 %
T 7 3.415 %
B 6 2.927 %
N 5 2.439 %
J 5 2.439 %
F 4 1.951 %
Q 4 1.951 %
C 2 0.976 %
R 1 0.488 %
M 1 0.488 %
Total Count: 205

Surrey Centre for Cyber Security

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