Briefly Describe How to Crack a Substitution Cipher

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The Answer is The substitution cipher is much harder to crack than the rail fence cipher. There are 26!, or roughly 4 × 10²⁶, different possible arrangements of the alphabet that could be used as a key. Clearly, the brute force strategy for finding the key would take an extremely long time. However, the substitution cipher does have a fatal flaw that we can exploit. The flaw is that the substitution cipher allows us to take advantage of patterns in the English language that help us deduce letters in the key. The first pattern to exploit is that some letters in the English language appear more frequently than others. If we count the number of times each letter occurs in a document such as this book, or any other English language book, we would find that the letters e, t, a, o, and i are much more common than many other letters in the alphabet. Using regular expressions can also help to fill in letters of a word in the ciphertext.

Briefly Describe How to Crack a Substitution Cipher

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Briefly Describe How to Crack a Substitution Cipher

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Correct Answer:VerifiedShow Answer

Correct Answer:
Verified