19FREQUENCY ANALYSIS
“The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first. If they do contain patterns, he does not see them just now, in any rational way. But there may be some subrational part of his mind that can go to work . . .”—Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to determine the frequency of each English letter in a particular text. You’ll then compare these frequencies to the letter frequencies of your ciphertext to get information about the original plaintext, which will help you break the encryption. This process of determining how frequently ...
Get Cracking Codes with Python now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
