On Thu, 08 Oct 2015 08:44:43 -0600, Ian Kelly wrote: > 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.
Oh please the Caesar cypher was mentioned as a simplification for the purpose of demonstration. it was not intended to be even a remotely serious suggestion which I am sure at least Denis understood when he posted his tongue in cheek reply. -- Economists can certainly disappoint you. One said that the economy would turn up by the last quarter. Well, I'm down to mine and it hasn't. -- Robert Orben -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list