how does a rail fence cipher work

• In the rail fence cipher, the plain-text is written downwards and diagonally on successive rails of an imaginary fence.
• When we reach the bottom rail, we traverse upwards moving diagonally, after reaching the top rail, the direction is changed again. ...
• After each alphabet has been written, the individual rows are combined to obtain the cipher-text.

Full Answer

What is the rail fence cipher?

The railfence cipher is an easy to apply transposition cipher that jumbles up the order of the letters of a message in a quick convenient way. It also has the security of a key to make it a little bit harder to break. The Rail Fence cipher works by writing your message on alternate lines across the page, and then reading off each line in turn.

How do you encrypt a rail fence?

Jan 20, 2017 · In the rail fence cipher, the plain-text is written downwards and diagonally on successive rails of an imaginary fence. When we reach the bottom rail, we traverse upwards moving diagonally, after reaching the top rail, the direction is... After each alphabet has been written, the individual rows ...

How do you write defend the east wall in cipher?

The rail fence cipher (sometimes called zigzag cipher) is a transposition cipher that jumbles up the order of the letters of a message using a basic algorithm. The rail fence cipher works by writing your message on alternate lines across the page, and then reading off each line in turn.

How to decrypt a ciphertext?

Oct 08, 2018 · The rail fence cipher (sometimes called zigzag cipher) is a transposition cipher that jumbles up the order of the letters of a message using a basic algorithm. The rail fence cipher works by writing your message on alternate lines across the page, and then reading off each line in turn. For example, let’s consider the plaintext “This is a secret message”.

How do you decode a rail fence cipher?

0:314:26Symmetric Key Cryptography: The Rail Fence Cipher - YouTubeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipUntil all the dashes in the top row of being replaced. Then replace the dashes in the second rowMoreUntil all the dashes in the top row of being replaced. Then replace the dashes in the second row with the rest of the ciphertext. Now you can read off the message in a zigzag fashion.

Is the rail fence cipher strong?

The rail fence cipher is not very strong; the number of practical keys is small enough that a cryptanalyst can try them all by hand.

What is the key in rail fence cipher?

The encryption key for a rail fence cipher is a positive integer. The following ciphertext was produced with a rail fence cipher with key 4. EOCSNYUWLEJYREASONS See if you can decrypt it.

Who created the rail fence cipher?

the GreeksThe Rail Fence Cipher was invented in ancient times. It was used by the Greeks, who created a special tool, called scytale, to make message encryption and decryption easier. Currently, it is usually used with a piece of paper.

What are the disadvantages of rail fence cipher?

Limitations of Rail Fence Technique It simply allows mixing up of characters in plain text to form the cipher text, it offers essentially no communication security and will be shown that it can be easily broken. 3. It cannot be used to encrypt images containing large areas of single color.

How does a null cipher work?

In a null cipher, the plaintext is included within the ciphertext and one needs to discard certain characters in order to decrypt the message. Most characters in such a cryptogram are nulls, only some are significant, and some others can be used as pointers to the significant ones.

How does substitution cipher work?

Substitution ciphers encrypt the plaintext by swapping each letter or symbol in the plaintext by a different symbol as directed by the key. Perhaps the simplest substitution cipher is the Caesar cipher, named after the man who used it.

How do you encrypt affine cipher?

The first step in encrypting the message is to write the numeric values of each letter. Now, take each value of x, and solve the first part of the equation, (5x + 8). After finding the value of (5x + 8) for each character, take the remainder when dividing the result of (5x + 8) by 26.

What is a zigzag cipher?

The rail fence cipher (also called a zigzag cipher) is a form of classical transposition cipher. It derives its name from the manner in which encryption is performed.

What is a dot in a letter?

A dot is made for each letter of the message in the proper column, reading from top to bottom of the sheet.

Can a ciphertext be decrypted?

is known, the ciphertext can be decrypted by using the above algorithm. Values of. , the length of the ciphertext, are not usable, since then the ciphertext is the same as the plaintext. Therefore the number of usable keys is low, allowing the brute-force attack of trying all possible keys.

Overview

Encryption

In the rail fence cipher, the plaintext is written downwards diagonally on successive "rails" of an imaginary fence, then moving up when the bottom rail is reached, down again when the top rail is reached, and so on until the whole plaintext is written out. The ciphertext is then read off in rows.
For example, to encrypt the message 'WE ARE DISCOVERED. RUN AT ONCE.' with 3 "rails", write the text as:

Decryption

Cryptanalysis

Zigzag cipher

See also

External links