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Using Ants to Attack a Classical Cipher
Matthew Russell, John A. Clark, and Susan Stepney
Department of Computer Science,
University of York,
York, YO10 5DD, U.K.
{matthew,jac,susan}@cs.york.ac.uk
Abstract. Transposition ciphers are a class of historical encryption algorithms based on rearranging units of plaintext according to some fixed permutation which acts as the secret key. Transpositions form a building block of modern ciphers, and applications of metaheuristic optimisation techniques to classical ciphers have preceded successful results on modern-day cryptological problems. In this paper we describe the use of Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) for the automatic recovery of the key, and hence the plaintext, from only the ciphertext.
LNCS 2723, p. 146 f.
lncs@springer.de
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003