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5 articles with this tag.
Encrypting with DES twice looks like it should double the key to 112 bits. A meet-in-the-middle attack shows it barely adds one bit of real security, which is why 3DES uses three passes. Learn the attack with runnable Python against real DES.
12 min read
The two-square cipher resists the ciphertext-only search that breaks Playfair and four-square, because it has no fixed reference squares. But a crib of known plaintext breaks it in seconds. Learn the known-plaintext attack, with runnable Python.
13 min read
DES never fell to clever math. It fell to a loop: try a key, encrypt a known block, compare, repeat. This post runs that exact loop against real DES, the same one EFF's Deep Crack ran over all 2⁵⁶ keys in 1998.
18 min read
The site's simplified Enigma breaker fixes the rotor order, skips the plugboard, and brute-forces 17,576 positions by statistics. The real Bombe did none of that. It searched rotor order and position too, deduced the plugboard through pure logic, and never scored a single decryption.
34 min read
Every other breaker on this site attacks ciphertext alone, guessing at a key through brute force or statistical search. The Hill cipher doesn't need any of that. Its encryption is pure linear algebra, so a handful of known plaintext letters is enough to solve for the entire key matrix directly.
16 min read
