Substitution Cipher

Hiding some data is known as encryption. When plain text is encrypted it becomes unreadable and is known as ciphertext. In a Substitution cipher, any character of plain text from the given fixed set of characters is substituted by some other character from the same set depending on a key. For example with a shift of 1, A would be replaced by B, B would become C, and so on. 

Note: A special case of Substitution cipher is known as Caesar cipher where the key is taken as 3.

Mathematical representation

The encryption can be represented using modular arithmetic by first transforming the letters into numbers, according to the scheme, A = 0, B = 1,…, Z = 25. Encryption of a letter by a shift n can be described mathematically as.

👁 E_n(x)=(x+n)mod\ 26

(Encryption Phase with shift n) 

👁 D_n(x)=(x-n)mod\ 26

(Decryption Phase with shift n) 

👁 substitution-cipher

Examples:

Plain Text: I am studying Data Encryption
Key: 4
Output: M eq wxyhCmrk Hexe IrgvCtxmsr

Plain Text: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Key: 4
Output: EFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcd

Algorithm for Substitution Cipher:

Input: 

• A String of both lower and upper case letters, called PlainText. 
• An Integer denoting the required key. 

Procedure:

• Create a list of all the characters. 
• Create a dictionary to store the substitution for all characters. 
• For each character, transform the given character as per the rule, depending on whether we’re encrypting or decrypting the text. 
• Print the new string generated. 

Below is the implementation.

Cipher Text is: M eq wxyhCmrk Hexe IrgvCtxmsr
Recovered plain text : I am studying Data Encryption

 Time Complexity: O(n)
Auxiliary Space: O(n)