<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>The most commonly used methods for solving classical (historical) ciphers are based on global optimization (meta-heuristic methods). Despite the fact that global optimization is a well-studied problem, in the case of classical ciphers, there are still many open questions such as the construction of fitness functions or efficient transformation of the cryptanalysis (breaking attempt) to an optimization problem. Therefore the transformation of a cryptanalytical task to an optimization problem and the choice of a suitable fitness function form an important part of the topic. In this paper, we focus on the simple columnar transposition in depth. Our main contribution is a detailed analysis and comparison of different fitness functions, fitness landscape analysis and solving experiments.</p></abstract>

The most commonly used methods for solving classical (historical) ciphers are based on global optimization (meta-heuristic methods). Despite the fact that global optimization is a well-studied problem, in the case of classical ciphers, there are still many open questions such as the construction of fitness functions or efficient transformation of the cryptanalysis (breaking attempt) to an optimization problem. Therefore the transformation of a cryptanalytical task to an optimization problem and the choice of a suitable fitness function form an important part of the topic. In this paper, we focus on the simple columnar transposition in depth. Our main contribution is a detailed analysis and comparison of different fitness functions, fitness landscape analysis and solving experiments.

Cryptanalysis of the Columnar Transposition Using Meta-Heuristics

Institute of Computer Science and Mathematics

Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava

Tatra Mountains Mathematical Publications

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

{"article-title":"Cryptanalysis of the Columnar Transposition Using Meta-Heuristics"}

The most commonly used methods for solving classical (historical) ciphers are based on global optimization (meta-heuristic methods). Despite the fact that...

Cryptanalysis of the Columnar Transposition Using Meta-Heuristics

Published Online: Aug 15, 2019

Page range: 39 - 60

Received: Oct 30, 2018

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/tmmp-2019-0005

Keywords
historical ciphers, columnar transposition, fitness function, grid, hill climbing, genetic algorithm, meta-heuristic, cryptanalysis

© 2019 Eugen Antal et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Cryptanalysis of the Columnar Transposition Using Meta-Heuristics

Published Online: Aug 15, 2019

Page range: 39 - 60

Received: Oct 30, 2018

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/tmmp-2019-0005

Keywordshistorical ciphers, columnar transposition, fitness function, grid, hill climbing, genetic algorithm, meta-heuristic, cryptanalysis

© 2019 Eugen Antal et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
historical ciphers, columnar transposition, fitness function, grid, hill climbing, genetic algorithm, meta-heuristic, cryptanalysis