I have always had a keen interest in cryptography and rather than give a brief history of cryptography I will recommend reading Simon Singh’s The code book or for a modern and hands on approach Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier (Who also made a brilliant book on security, more of descriptive approach but very interesting Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World).
This post aims to detail the creation (in python) of one of the simplest forms of encryption; the simple Caesar shift (or shift cipher). The Caesar shift takes the normal alphabet and maps it to a an identical alphabet with a rotation. The cipher will be written in such a way that it can be easily expanded on to create more complex encryption schemes with little modification.
The above image shows a diagrammatic representation of a Caesar shift of 3 (alphabet transposed onto a rotation of itself with a displacement of 3). Below shows the entire alphabet in plaintext and in ciphertext, followed by a simple sentence in plaintext and in cipher text.
Plaintext: | abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz |
Ciphertext: | defghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabc |
Plaintext: | the cat sat on the mat |
Ciphertext: | wkh fdw vdw rq wkh pdw |
Below is the code to convert plaintext into ciphertext along with an example of the usage:
def caesar(plaintext,shift): alphabet=["a","b","c","d","e","f","g","h","i","j","k","l", "m","n","o","p","q","r","s","t","u","v","w","x","y","z"] #Create our substitution dictionary dic={} for i in range(0,len(alphabet)): dic[alphabet[i]]=alphabet[(i+shift)%len(alphabet)] #Convert each letter of plaintext to the corrsponding #encrypted letter in our dictionary creating the cryptext ciphertext="" for l in plaintext.lower(): if l in dic: l=dic[l] ciphertext+=l return ciphertext #Example useage plaintext="the cat sat on the mat" print "Plaintext:", plaintext print "Cipertext:",caesar(plaintext,3) #This will result in: #Plaintext: the cat sat on the mat #Cipertext: wkh fdw vdw rq wkh pdw
Explanation
Here we have written a function that is given the plaintext and an arbitary rotation (including negative) and returns a ciphertext. The function creates a dictionary, mapping each letter to another letter that is ‘shift’ letters away from it in the alphabet (the modulus (%) is used so to wrap the alphabet back to the start if it falls off the end). It then converts each letter of the plain text into the corresponding encrypted letter using the dictionary.
Future
In the next post I will discuss methods to improve the Caesar shift and how to turn it into a full substitution cipher (where the alphabet is shuffled rather than rotated). The Caesar shift is very susceptible to brute forcing and frequency analysis which I shall explain and create a program to defeat these encryptions in a future post.
Hi !
Your code is very clean, but i don’t understand line 9 : what’s “shift” ? You didn’t create any variable named after this …
Instead of a dictionnary, you could have used a string in order to run the string.translate() method instead of lines 13-17.
I made a caesar decoder, which use a dictionnary of words to decode :
All substitution ciphers are easily expressed with Python’s str.translate or unicode.translate that basically work with explicit subsitutions.
See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1538935/caesars-cipher-using-python-could-use-a-little-help/1539611#1539611
@wumzi: shift is passed to the function caesar(plaintext,shift) and defines how far the transposed alphabet is moved. IE shift=0 a=a b=b, shift=1 a=b b=c etc…. Also thanks for your code, I’ll give it a try after I write my own version 🙂
@Ulrik: Cheers for the link, that looks like a simpler solution however I don’t think it could be used for the customizations that I’d like to include in future versions (such as methods for defeating frequency analysis)
@mat:
Sorry, there’s mistakes in the code, i just translated the names in english before posting it , and moreover there’s no indentation 🙂
But, it’s now posted on my wiki : https://www.wumzi.info/wiki/doku.php?id=decodeur_de_code_cesar
Yes, I’m from France
Thanks wumzi, I’ve rewritten the caesar and substitution ciphers to use the maketrans function. The new functions can be found here
[…] Python: Cryptography Caesar shift encryption (shift cipher) | Stealthcopter.com plaintext= "the cat sat on the mat" print "Plaintext:" , plaintext return ciphertext […]
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#Defines the main function
def caesar(string, shift):
#Stores the alphabet, large and small
beta = “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ”
alpha = “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”
#result storage
result = []
#iterates through the string, checks if letter is in alpha or beta and appends shifted letter
for x in string:
if x in beta:
result.append(beta[(beta.index(x) + shift) % 26])
elif x in alpha:
result.append(alpha[(alpha.index(x) + shift) % 26])
else:
result.append(x)
#joins the result and returns it
result = “”.join(result)
return result
plaintext = “the cat sat on the mat”
print (“Plaintext: “, plaintext)
print (“Cipertext: “,caesar(plaintext,3))
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