Paper 2020/1492
Automated ciphertext-only attack on the Wheatstone Cryptograph and related devices
Abstract
We examine some historical proto-mechanical cryptographic devices, such as the Wheatstone Cryptograph, that employ revolving clock hands or rotating concentric disks. The action of these “cipher clocks” can be factored into a stream cipher followed by a monoalphabetic substitution. This allows us to perform a stochastic hill-climbing attack to break the substitution. The attack maximizes a fitness that measures how well a decryption of the substitution cipher resembles an encryption of the stream cipher alone.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- Keywords
- Wheatstone Cryptograph Wadsworth cipher disk Urkryptografen cipher clock hill-climbing attack
- Contact author(s)
- kaeding @ blackswan duckdns org
- History
- 2022-11-30: revised
- 2020-11-29: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2020/1492
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/1492,
author = {Thomas Kaeding},
title = {Automated ciphertext-only attack on the Wheatstone Cryptograph and related devices},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2020/1492},
year = {2020},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1492}
}
