cryptography

murshid_islam

i was reading simon singh's the code book. it describes different systems of cryptography. but what i wanted to know was how to 'crack' different ciphers.
can any suggest anything i can read.
thanks to anyone who can help.

d_leet

I have this book I haven't gotten very far in it but it does teach several types of ciphers and how to attack them.

finchie_88

I've read that book, what type of cipher are you talking about, the book mentions many types of cipher, its a bit hard to say how to break them without knowing the cipher you had in mind.

murshid_islam

how do you break the monoalphabetic cipher with Homophones?
thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

finchie_88

Are you doing the puzzles at the back of the book? I done them

The way you solve that is to use frequency analysis on the characters in the "sample", then you can use that to guess what symbols stand for what. It helps if you look at the frequency of the characters before and after each character, since vowels are found before and after almost anything, but constanants are slightly less 'social'.

murshid_islam

i was talking about the "homophones". is it possible to crack it using frequency analysis?

finchie_88

Yes, its harder than without, but you can still do it when there are homophones involved. It just requires a little guess work.

murshid_islam

could you please elaborate a little. what i want to know is how to crack the cipher with homophones. because if we use homophones the frequency of all the letters are almost same.

thanks