Cracking Codes with Python

15HACKING THE AFFINE CIPHER

“Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilization had reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, and linguistics.”—Simon Singh, The Code Book

In Chapter 14, you learned that the affine cipher is limited to only a few thousand keys, which means we can easily perform a brute-force attack against it. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to write a program that can break affine cipher–encrypted messages.

TOPICS COVERED IN THIS CHAPTER

• The exponent operator (**)

• The continue statement

Source Code for the Affine Cipher Hacker Program

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