On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 6:01 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> wrote: > On Wed, 7 Oct 2015 13:05:07 +0000 (UTC), alister > <alister.nospam.w...@ntlworld.com> declaimed the following: > > >>With a simple Cesar the method is "shift the alphabet by 'X' characters >>and X is the key >> >>if the key is unknown then the attacker still has to brute force the >>method (admittedly with only 25 options this is not difficult) > > But who'd consider that with just one-case and alphabet only... > > At the least include upper, lower, numbers, and basic punctuation -- > that will add a few more cycles of computation time to break <G>
It doesn't really matter how much you add; any Caesar cipher is going to fall easily to just a little bit of frequency analysis. Consider an extreme case, where the range of X is the size of the entire Unicode character set. If the message is written in a Latin-based character set, chances are good that the majority of the characters will fall within a range of <96, giving the attacker a great starting point to brute-force from. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
