Provided by: cifer_1.2.0-0ubuntu3_amd64 bug

NAME

       cifer - multipurpose classical cryptanalysis and code‐breaking tool

SYNOPSIS

       cifer [-finqs] [command]

DESCRIPTION

       Cifer  provides  many  functions designed to aid in cracking classical ciphers; a group of
       ciphers used historically, but  which  have  now  fallen  into  disuse  because  of  their
       suceptability  to  ciphertext‐only attacks. In general, they were designed and implemented
       by hand, and operate on an alphabet of letters (such as [A‐Z]).

       Cifer is implemented as an interactive shell, with support  for  scripting.   All  of  its
       commands  are  documented  via  the  usage command. For instance, type usage load_dict for
       information on the load_dict command.

   Buffers and Filters
       The shell uses the concept of a buffer to store a string of text, which most comands  read
       from  as  input,  and  write  to  as  output.  Unless  run  with the -n option, cifer will
       automatically create 10 buffers  at  startup.   Buffers  are  referred  to  in  the  form,
       buffer_#,  where  # is substituted with the buffer's index number. For more information on
       buffers, see the usage for: buffers, resize, clear, copy, load, write,  read,  bufferinfo,
       and nullbuffer.

       Filters  can  be  used to manipulate the set of characters in a buffer, for example making
       all characters uppercase, or removing all whitespace. For more information on filters, see
       the usage of filter.

   Dictionaries
       Some  of  cifer's  functions  require  a specially formatted 'dictionary', which takes the
       basic form of a list of words. The utility cifer-dict(1)  can  be  used  to  create  these
       dictionaries. The loaddict command is used to load a dictionary for use.

   Frequency Analysis
       Frequency  analysis  is  the  study of the frequency of symbols, or groups of symbols in a
       ciphertext. It aids in cracking monoalphabetic  substition  schemes.   Frequency  analysis
       works upon the principle that, in any given sample of written language, certain characters
       and groups of characters will occur more often than others. Furthermore, the  distribution
       of  those  frequencies  will be roughly the same for all samples of that written language.
       For instance, in any section of English language, the character 'E' appears far more often
       than 'X'.  Likewise, the pair of letters 'TH' is very common, whilst 'XY' is very rare. In
       monoalphabetic substitution schemes, these patterns are preserved and it  is  possible  to
       determine  certain  mapppings  of  letters from ciphertext‐>plaintext from the frequencies
       alone. As more and more characters are converted, it becomes easy to guess  the  remaining
       ones to form words in the target language.

       Perhaps  the  most  tedious  part  of  this  method  is the actual counting of the symbols
       themselves. Thus,  Cifer  provides  functions  to  count  characters,  digrams  (pairs  of
       characters),  and  trigrams (triplets of characters). It can also use frequency analyis to
       guess ciphertext‐>plaintext mappings for the English language. For more  information,  see
       the    usage   for:   frequency_guesses,   identity_frequency_graph,   frequency_analysis,
       count_digrams, and count_trigrams.

   Affine Ciphers
       An affine cipher is a type of monoalphabetic substitution cipher. In order to implement an
       affine  cipher,  one  would  assign  each  character  of the chosen alphabet a number, for
       example, a = 0; b = 1; c = 2; etc. Then for each letter of the plaintext, put  it  through
       the encryption function:

       e(x) = (ax + b) (mod m)

       Where  x  is  the  plaintext character's assigned number, a and m are coprime and m is the
       size of the alphabet. The  ciphertext  character  for  this  plaintext  character  is  the
       character assigned to the number e(x).

       Cifer  provides  functions  to  both  encrypt  and decrypt affine ciphers as well as crack
       affine ciphers using frequency analysis or brute force. Note that cifer is currently  only
       able  to  deal with affine ciphers where m = 26.  For more information, see the usage for:
       affinesolve, affinebf, affineencode, affinedecode, and mmi.

   Vigenere Ciphers
       The Vigenere cipher is a form of polyalphabetic substitution consisting of several  Caesar
       ciphers  in  sequence  with  differing  shift  values, which vary according to a repeating
       keyword. Cifer provides the function vigenere_crack, which employs a brute‐force (for each
       possible keyword length) frequency analysis method in order to find the keyword, and crack
       the cipher.

   Keyword Ciphers
       A keyword cipher is a  type  of  monoalphabetic  substitution  in  which  the  mapping  of
       plaintext characters to ciphertext characters is affected by the inclusion of a 'keyword'.
       Cifer provides the function keyword_bruteforce which attempts to find the correct  keyword
       by  going  through  a  'dictionary'  of  possible  words and trying each one in turn, then
       selecting the best solution by matching words in the solution to those in the  dictionary.
       If  the  keyword  to  a  ciphertext  is  already  known,  it  can  be  decoded  using  the
       keyword_decode command.

   Bacon Ciphers
       A bacon cipher is a method of  stenography,  in  which  a  message  is  concealed  in  the
       presentation  of  text,  rather  than  its content. The ciphertext consists of any message
       (again, the language has no impact on the concealed plaintext) in which each character can
       be  categorised  into  one  of  two  distinct  groups,  we  call  these  'A' and 'B'. This
       distinction may be made in any number of predetermined ways, such  as  two  typefaces,  or
       other  indicators.  In  order to decode the cipher one replaces groups of 5 As and Bs with
       their corresponding plaintext character, as dictated by the Baconian alphabet (however, be
       aware  that  it  would  be  trivial  for the two communicating parties to create their own
       'custom' version of the Baconian alphabet). To encode a plaintext, the  reverse  operation
       is performed.

       A   Bacon  cipher  can  be  easily  encoded/decoded,  and  cifer  provides  the  functions
       bacon_encode and bacon_decode to achieve this. They use a buffer of As and Bs as input and
       output,  and thus any ciphertext that needs to be decoded must first be turned into As and
       Bs. Before the plaintext is loaded, it should be modified so that  upper  and  lower  case
       characters  belong  to the A and B groups, respectively. Then, the casebacon filter can be
       applied to convert the upper and lower case characters in the buffer to As and  Bs.  There
       is also a bacon filter, which removes all characters which are not 'A' or 'B'.

   Rail Fence Ciphers
       The  rail fence cipher is a form of transposition cipher, which gets its name from the way
       the plaintext is written alternatively downwards and upwards diagonally on 'rails', before
       being read off as the ciphertext in rows.

       Cifer  provides  the  function rfbf to crack rail fence ciphers using a brute force method
       and checking for solutions using a dictionary.

   Columnar Transposition
       Columnar transposition is a relatively complex form of cipher,  with  many  variants.  The
       basic  process of encoding using this method involves first writing the plaintext out in a
       table defined by its width (which is also the length of the keyword). Then,  depending  on
       the  variant,  the  ciphertext  is  written  and  read  out  of the table in any number of
       different ways.

       The keyword can be specified in numeric or alphabetic form. In the former, each digit must
       only be used once and there must be enough digits to form a full key (ie. for a key length
       4, all the digits [0,1,2,3] must be used). An alphabetic keyword, such as  'apple',  first
       has  duplicate  letters removed. This gives us 'aple'. If you were encrypting by hand, you
       would write out 'aple' at the top of your table, and them move the  columns  around  until
       the keyword is in alphabetic order, ie. 'aelp'.

       In order to decrypt a ciphertext, we first 'flip' the keyword, turning 'aelp' into 'plea'.
       We can then use this keyword as if we were encrypting, and the process  will  reverse  the
       original function to give us the plaintext.

       Cifer's  keyword  functions  provide  utilities to automate many variants.  There are nine
       commands: c2c_encode, c2c_decode, c2c_bruteforce, r2c_encode, r2c_decode,  r2c_bruteforce,
       c2r_encode, c2r_decode and c2r_bruteforce.

       The first three letters of each command are short for: 'column to column', ´column to row'
       and 'row to column'; these refer to different ways in which the ciphertext can be read off
       the  table.  In c2c, the table is written from left to right, re‐ordered and read off left
       to right again. In r2c, the table is written from top to bottom, re‐ordered and then  read
       off from left to right. Finally, in c2r the table is written left to right, re‐ordered and
       read off from top to bottom.

       ´Encode' and 'decode' mode both  take  a  keyword  and  work  as  one  would  expect.   In
       'bruteforce' mode, cifer tries all permutations of increasing key lengths in an attempt to
       find the real keyword. It tests possible solutions by matching words in the dictionary.

OPTIONS

       -n     Disable auto-init.

       -f     Execute the commands in the (script) file specified, then exit

       -i     Execute the script file and then go to interactive mode

       -q     Do not fully parse file before execution

       -s     Exit on soft-fails, not just hard-fails (for script execution)

       Any text found after the options will be interpreted as a command  to  the  shell;  Please
       note  that  you  cannot  specify a command if either -i or -f are used, and that -q and -s
       only apply to -f or -i.

BUGS

       Please   report   any   bugs   by    sending    email    to    either    Simrun    Basuita
       <simrunbasuita@googlemail.com> or Daniel Richman <danieljonathanrichman@googlemail.com>.

AUTHORS

       Daniel       Richman      <danieljonathanrichman@googlemail.com>,      Simrun      Basuita
       <simrunbasuita@googlemail.com>

COPYRIGHT

       This manual page is Copyright 2008 Simrun Basuita and Daniel Richman.

       This manual page was written by Simrun Basuita <simrunbasuita@googlemail.com>  and  Daniel
       Richman <danieljonathanrichman@googlemail.com>.  Permission is granted to copy, distribute
       and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License,  Version  3
       or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

       On  Debian  systems,  the  complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in
       /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.

SEE ALSO

       cifer-dict(1)

                                                                                         CIFER(1)