Publication Date

Fall 2016

Degree Type

Master's Project

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Mark Stamp

Second Advisor

Department of Computer Science

Third Advisor

Department of Computer Science

Keywords

Substitution Ciphers HMM

Abstract

We investigate the effectiveness of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with random restarts as a mean of breaking a homophonic substitution cipher. Based on extensive experiments, we find that such an HMM-based attack outperforms a previously de- veloped nested hill climb approach, particularly when the ciphertext message is short. We then consider a combination cipher, consisting of a homophonic substitution and a column transposition. We develop and analyze an attack on such a cipher. This attack employs an HMM (with random restarts), together with a hill climb to recover the column permutation. We show that this attack can succeed on relatively short ci- phertext messages. Finally, we test this combined attack on the unsolved Zodiac 340 cipher.

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