2.1-2.2 and 2.4, due on September 10

So, I think that it would be difficult to discover and remember all of the frequency tables that were presented in 2.4. I have been working on a program that will take a string of characters and encrypt or decrypt a substitution cipher, if you give it a mapping from the alphabet to itself; then I read the section on vigenere ciphers and wanted to redo the code for that instead. I still am not very familiar with Maple and am going to do it in Java instead.


I wonder how possible it might be to write all of these heuristics into a code that will do a ciphertext only attack on an affine substitution cipher. I think that it would take more time than I have to spare during this semester, but if I wrote it in chunks I might be able to get it done sometime afterwards and then have a really cool program. My group is considering using a vigenere cipher as the homework assignment for this week, but will probably modify it so it is more original and our own idea. I suppose the problem is that people have been coding messages so long that most of the ideas that cryptography students would have their first week in class would have already been done by someone else.

I guess that the originality thing is harder than the frequency table thing.