January 2018
Intermediate to advanced
416 pages
10h 40m
English
The gaffer says something longer and more complicated. After a while, Waterhouse (now wearing his cryptoanalyst hat, searching for meaning midst apparent randomness, his neural circuits exploiting the redundancies in the signal) realizes that the man is speaking heavily accented English.—Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

Previously, we used the transposition file cipher to encrypt and decrypt entire files, but we haven’t tried writing a brute-force program to hack the cipher yet. Messages encrypted with the transposition file cipher can have thousands of possible keys, which your computer can still easily brute-force, ...