Q&A for How to Encode and Decode Using the Vigènere Cipher

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What kind of secret texting uses double letters, capital and lowercase?

MePedro

Community Answer

Playfair uses pairs of capital letters. If you want to have lower case letters too, the alphabet of the classic ciphers could be enhanced. All modern ciphers support all kind of characters.

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Question

How does W and L equal L? I didn't get that as my answer.

Community Answer

It's not W + L = L, but L + L = W. You take the written L, check with your keyword letter written under (L), and on your board you will find W.

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Question

Can Vignere be used in combination with other ciphers (e.g. at-bash or a1z26)?

Community Answer

Yes, for instance: (your message), and if that was z gfxr cvd (not real message) you could just go: z=a, g=t, and so on.

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Question

What cypher technique would result in the word "Avocado" to be encrypted as "JJvfsTkN*Ud"?

Community Answer

The cypher technique is the Caesar cipher, which substitutes letters in the alphabet.

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Question

Can this be used to break RSA encryption?

Community Answer

No. RSA is a very different type of cipher from Vigenere. Cracking RSA is done by finding the prime factors of an inconveniently large number.

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Question

How do I encode and decode using the vigenere cipher if I don't know the keyword?

Community Answer

First you want to find the length of the unknown keyword. Do that by looking for repeated letter sequences in the ciphertext. In the likely case that they came from encrypting the same plaintext, the distance between them is a multiple of the keyword length. Once you know the length of the keyword, Vigenere reduces to a bunch of Caesar ciphers which are easily cracked by frequency analysis, etc.

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