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Cracking Codes with Python
book

Cracking Codes with Python

by Al Sweigart
January 2018
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
416 pages
10h 40m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from Cracking Codes with Python

6HACKING THE CAESAR CIPHER WITH BRUTE-FORCE

“Arab scholars . . . invented cryptanalysis, the science of unscrambling a message without knowledge of the key.”—Simon Singh, The Code Book

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We can hack the Caesar cipher by using a cryptanalytic technique called brute-force. A brute-force attack tries every possible decryption key for a cipher. Nothing stops a cryptanalyst from guessing one key, decrypting the ciphertext with that key, looking at the output, and then moving on to the next key if they didn’t find the secret message. Because the brute-force technique is so effective against the Caesar cipher, you shouldn’t actually use the Caesar cipher ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492067498