Automated Cryptanalysis of Classical Ciphers

Classical ciphers are used to encrypt plaintext messages written in a natural language in such a way that they are readable for sender or intended recipient only. Many classical ciphers can be broken by brute-force search through the key-space. Methods of artificial intelligence, such as optimization heuristics, can be used to narrow the search space, to speed-up text processing and text recognition in the cryptanalytic process. Here we present a broad overview of different AI techniques usable in cryptanalysis of classical ciphers. Specific methods to effectively recognize the correctly decrypted text among many possible decrypts are discussed in the next part Automated cryptanalysis – Language processing.