Security in IT and Information Technology: Techniques for Deciphering Messages

SECURITY IN IT AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 1
Security in It and Information Technology
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SECURITY IN IT AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 2
Task 5
i. Explain what various techniques you could use to try to decipher the message (or simplify
the decryption process / bypass the decryption process altogether).
Decryption is the process of converting cipher text into plaintext. Conversely, the
highlighted below are some of the techniques which are used. The first technique is
monoalphabetic substitution. This involves each letter of the alphabet to be replaced as per the
key with another letter or symbol. The second technique is the Caesar shift cipher. This
technique requires a person to be told which Caesar cipher was used to decipher a message.
Probable word attack is another technique which involves having little knowledge about the
message is all about (Meingast, Roosta and Sastry 2016).
The fourth technique is polyalphabetic substitution based ciphers. In this technique,
multiple alphabetic strings are used to encode the plaintext. The fifth technique is transposition
based ciphers where the order of the plaintext is not preserved.
ii. For automated techniques estimate approximately how long the technique would take to
decipher the message on current high end consumer hardware (Intel Core i7 6950X
running at 3.0GHz).
The number of operations per second is usually influenced by the clock frequency. In this
case, the approximate time to decipher a message on a hardware running at 3GHz, Intel core i7
6950x is as illustrated below. To start with, the CPU usually fetches the instructions from the
memory and hence fetches data to operate if needed and executes it. Conversely, the CPU has a
frequency of 3GHz which means it can produce 3000, 000, 000 cycles per second. As for the