Security of a Shift Cipher

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Shift ciphers are the most basic form of cipher that can be used, the only problem is, they are not very secure ciphers. The only time a shift cipher can be secure, it is also perfectly secure. This “perfect security” only happens when a shift cipher is used on a single letter of plaintext and no more. If practicality is being considered, then this is not an efficient use of enciphering a message. It simply isn’t practical to send a single encrypted letter. In order to understand the insecure encryption of a shift cipher, it must first be understood how a shift cipher encrypts a message.
The way a shift cipher works is that a letter in plaintext, is replaced by another letter from the alphabet. When using the Standard English alphabet you will have twenty-six different letters that the plaintext can be ciphered to, for example, the plaintext letter “e” could be enciphered to the ciphertext letter “m” meaning the letters would have shifted by eight. The “key” for your enciphered text is now eight, because it takes eight letters from “e” to get to the letter “m”. With this information, it can be seen why a simple shift cipher could easily be decrypted when using only a pair of letters. For example say someone is trying to decrypt a stolen piece of ciphertext, the only way this person will be able to decrypt this piece of text is if they know the way it is encrypted, and the key. The important thing to remember is that the thief may know how it is encrypted but unless he knows the key, he will not be able to decrypt the text. The key is the most important part in any piece of ciphertext, and should only be known to the sender and the receiver of the encrypted text. In this lies the problem with the shift cipher.
Finding out the key would be a thief’s main objective, because without it, there is no way they can read the ciphertext. Once they have figured out what the key is, it is a short trip to decrypt the message and read the plaintext. If the ciphertext is longer than one letter long, the key will be able to decrypt every single letter to its original plaintext, then decrypting the entire message. For example if the plaintext was the word please and it was encrypted using a shift cipher with a key of eight the ciphertext would then be xtmiam.

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