Attack On The Polyalphabetic Substitution Cipher Using A Parallel Genetic Algorithm

In this paper three optimization heuristics are presented which can be utilized in attacks on the transposition cipher. These heuristics are simulated annealing, genetic algorithm and tabu search. We will show that each of these heuristics provides effective automated techniques for the cryptanalysis of the ciphertext. The property which make this cipher vulnerable, is that it is not sophisticated enough to hide the inherent properties or statistics of the language of the plaintext.