View Proposal

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Proposer

Mike Just

Title

Cracking some historical ciphertexts

Goal

Write an application that automatically cryptanalyses ciphertext for a variety of historical ciphers

Description

There are plenty of tools for using historical ciphers to encrypt plaintext to ciphertext, but very few to do the reverse and cryptanalyse ciphertext. Your aim is to build an application that takes a ciphertext as input (and possibly some partial plaintext or other information, such as the language of the plaintext), (optionally) the name of the cipher used to encrypt it, and produces one or more possible plaintexts (without knowledge of the key). This project will be a useful exercise for understanding how different ciphers work and the approaches used to cracking them. There are some interesting challenges related to automatically detecting whether you have recovered a valid plaintext.

Resources

Background

Ideally for students enrolled in F20CN/F21CN in Semester 1 who have an interest in learning more about cryptography. Some knowledge and interest in NLP might be useful for detecting correct plaintext messages.

Url

Difficulty Level

Moderate

Ethical Approval

None

Number Of Students

2

Supervisor

Mike Just

Keywords

cybersecurity, cryptography

Degrees

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Systems
Master of Engineering in Software Engineering
Master of Science in Computer Science for Cyber Security
Master of Science in Computing (2 Years)
Master of Science in Information Technology (Software Systems)
Master of Science in Network Security
Master of Science in Software Engineering
Bachelor of Science in Computing Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (Cyber Security)