The other approach to concealing plaintext structure in the ciphertext involves using several different monoalphabetic substitution ciphers rather than just one; the key specifies which particular substitution is to be employed for encrypting each plaintext symbol. The resulting ciphers, known generically as polyalphabetics, have a long history of usage. The systems differ mainly in the way in which the key is used to choose among the collection of monoalphabetic substitution rules.
The best-known polyalphabetics are the simple Vigenère ciphers, named for the 16th-century French cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère. For many years this type of cipher was thought to be impregnable and was known as le chiffre indéchiffrable, literally “the unbreakable cipher.” The procedure for encrypting and decrypting Vigenère ciphers is illustrated in the .
In the simplest systems of the Vigenère type, the key is a word or phrase that is repeated as many times as required to encipher a message. If the key is DECEPTIVE and the message is WE ARE DISCOVERED SAVE YOURSELF, then the resulting cipher will be
The shows the extent to which the raw frequency of occurrence pattern is obscured by encrypting the text of this article using the repeating key DECEPTIVE. Nevertheless, in 1861 Friedrich W. Kasiski, formerly a German army officer and cryptanalyst, published a solution of repeated-key Vigenère ciphers based on the fact that identical pairings of message and key symbols generate the same cipher symbols. Cryptanalysts look for precisely such repetitions. In the example given above, the group VTW appears twice, separated by six letters, suggesting that the key (i.e., word) length is either three or nine. Consequently, the cryptanalyst would partition the cipher symbols into three and nine monoalphabets and attempt to solve each of these as a simple substitution cipher. With sufficient ciphertext, it would be easy to solve for the unknown key word.
The periodicity of a repeating key exploited by Kasiski can be eliminated by means of a running-key Vigenère cipher. Such a cipher is produced when a nonrepeating text is used for the key. Vigenère actually proposed concatenating the plaintext itself to follow a secret key word in order to provide a running key in what is known as an autokey.
Even though running-key or autokey ciphers eliminate periodicity, two methods exist to cryptanalyze them. In one, the cryptanalyst proceeds under the assumption that both the ciphertext and the key share the same frequency distribution of symbols and applies statistical analysis. For example, E occurs in English plaintext with a frequency of 0.0169, and T occurs only half as often. The cryptanalyst would, of course, need a much larger segment of ciphertext to solve a running-key Vigenère cipher, but the basic principle is essentially the same as before—i.e., the recurrence of like events yields identical effects in the ciphertext. The second method of solving running-key ciphers is commonly known as the probable-word method. In this approach, words that are thought most likely to occur in the text are subtracted from the cipher. For example, suppose that an encrypted message to President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America was intercepted. Based on a statistical analysis of the letter frequencies in the ciphertext, and the South’s encryption habits, it appears to employ a running-key Vigenère cipher. A reasonable choice for a probable word in the plaintext might be “PRESIDENT.” For simplicity a space will be encoded as a “0.” PRESIDENT would then be encoded—not encrypted—as “16, 18, 5, 19, 9, 4, 5, 14, 20” using the rule A = 1, B = 2, and so forth. Now these nine numbers are added modulo 27 (for the 26 letters plus a space symbol) to each successive block of nine symbols of ciphertext—shifting one letter each time to form a new block. Almost all such additions will produce random-like groups of nine symbols as a result, but some may produce a block that contains meaningful English fragments. These fragments can then be extended with either of the two techniques described above. If provided with enough ciphertext, the cryptanalyst can ultimately decrypt the cipher. What is important to bear in mind here is that the redundancy of the English language is high enough that the amount of information conveyed by every ciphertext component is greater than the rate at which equivocation (i.e., the uncertainty about the plaintext that the cryptanalyst must resolve to cryptanalyze the cipher) is introduced by the running key. In principle, when the equivocation is reduced to zero, the cipher can be solved. The number of symbols needed to reach this point is called the unicity distance—and is only about 25 symbols, on average, for simple substitution ciphers.
Vernam-Vigenère ciphers
In 1918 Gilbert S. Vernam, an engineer for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T), introduced the most important key variant to the Vigenère system. At that time all messages transmitted over AT&T’s teleprinter system were encoded in the Baudot Code, a binary code in which a combination of marks and spaces represents a letter, number, or other symbol. Vernam suggested a means of introducing equivocation at the same rate at which it was reduced by redundancy among symbols of the message, thereby safeguarding communications against cryptanalytic attack. He saw that periodicity (as well as frequency information and intersymbol correlation), on which earlier methods of decryption of different Vigenère systems had relied, could be eliminated if a random series of marks and spaces (a running key) were mingled with the message during encryption to produce what is known as a stream or streaming cipher.
There was one serious weakness in Vernam’s system, however. It required one key symbol for each message symbol, which meant that communicants would have to exchange an impractically large key in advance—i.e., they had to securely exchange a key as large as the message they would eventually send. The key itself consisted of a punched paper tape that could be read automatically while symbols were typed at the teletypewriter keyboard and encrypted for transmission. This operation was performed in reverse using a copy of the paper tape at the receiving teletypewriter to decrypt the cipher. Vernam initially believed that a short random key could safely be reused many times, thus justifying the effort to deliver such a large key, but reuse of the key turned out to be vulnerable to attack by methods of the type devised by Kasiski. Vernam offered an alternative solution: a key generated by combining two shorter key tapes of m and n binary digits, or bits, where m and n share no common factor other than 1 (they are relatively prime). A bit stream so computed does not repeat until mn bits of key have been produced. This version of the Vernam cipher system was adopted and employed by the U.S. Army until Major Joseph O. Mauborgne of the Army Signal Corps demonstrated during World War I that a cipher constructed from a key produced by linearly combining two or more short tapes could be decrypted by methods of the sort employed to cryptanalyze running-key ciphers. Mauborgne’s work led to the realization that neither the repeating single-key nor the two-tape Vernam-Vigenère cipher system was cryptosecure. Of far greater consequence to modern cryptology—in fact, an idea that remains its cornerstone—was the conclusion drawn by Mauborgne and William F. Friedman that the only type of cryptosystem that is unconditionally secure uses a random onetime key. The proof of this, however, was provided almost 30 years later by another AT&T researcher, Claude Shannon, the father of modern information theory.
In a streaming cipher the key is incoherent—i.e., the uncertainty that the cryptanalyst has about each successive key symbol must be no less than the average information content of a message symbol. The dotted curve in the figure indicates that the raw frequency of occurrence pattern is lost when the draft text of this article is encrypted with a random onetime key. The same would be true if digraph or trigraph frequencies were plotted for a sufficiently long ciphertext. In other words, the system is unconditionally secure, not because of any failure on the part of the cryptanalyst to find the right cryptanalytic technique but rather because he is faced with an irresolvable number of choices for the key or plaintext message.