
The one-time pad must be equal to or longer in characters than the plaintext. Encryption ProcessĪ one-time pad or key is used to encrypt plaintext. It is the only cipher still proven to be unbreakable.Īll other ciphers and encryption methods are based on computational security and integrity, therefore they are theoretically discoverable given enough time, computational power and ciphertext. The Vernam Cipher was invented in 1917 by the American scientist Gilbert Vernam. Please refer below for an in-depth explanation and usage examples. With this latest update, the vernamcipher package is officially using the strongest encryption methods with truly-random keys.

#Vernam cipher generator
Credit to The Australian National University for their Quantum Random Number Generator (no affiliation). The Key can contain ASCII values that are not able to be entered by a keyboard.The vernamcipher project is now using truly-random keys.Long keys are hard to remember and are prone to mistakes when copying.This means you are storing and generating a large random key that will take up as much space as the data itself. The key must be equal in size, or larger than the data you are encrypting.Now we use 2048 or 4096 bits for online transactions.Ī Vernam Cipher provides perfect security, however it does have its drawbacks. If it was on a single machine they estimate it would have taken 1500 years, the scientists also estimated that it would take 1,000 times longer to break a 1,024-bit encryption key, which was originally used for online transactions. In 2009, computer scientists using factorisation were able to discover the primes within a 768-bit number, but it took almost two years and hundreds of computers to factor it. The 2 prime numbers cannot be close together This is easily calculated, however identifying which 2 numbers have been used for a given product is much harder than it sounds. It uses the product of 2 large prime numbers (atleast 512 digits) in its algorithm. Therefore keys which have 128 bits (2 128) should be computationally secure.Įven RSA encryption could be broken with unlimited time & processing power. However the number of keys it could check in the whole time from the big bang until now (14 billion years) would be 2 112. If a super computer can check one key per clock cycle it could check 2 80 keys in one year. Apart from the Vernam Cipher every encryption method could be brute forced eventually given unlimited processing power and time. This relaxes perfect security by allowing security to fail with tiny probability, and by only considering efficient attacks. One letter "E" may not have the same key as another "E".Īn encryption method is considered to be computationally secure if it is safe to assume that no known attack can break it in a practical amount of time.

This means that any crypto analysis will come back with a straight line even with a large amount of data. This assumes that the key:Ī Vernam cipher is perfectly secure as each character will have a random key that it is XOR'd with. Cryptanalysis will not produce any meaningful results because the distribution of any frequency analysis will be evenly distributed. This means an eavesdropper would not, by gaining knowledge of the ciphertext but not of the key, be able to improve their guess of the plaintext even given unlimited computing power. The Vernam Cipher is described as having perfect security. This time when you perform the Bitwise XOR the output will be the original value from the plain text.ġ using System 2 using 3 using System.Linq 4 using System.Text 5 using 6 using System.IO 7 8 namespace VernamCipher 9 Perfect Security This is done by again writing the ASCII value for each letter/character with the corresponding letter/character from the key.

If you have the encrypted cipher text, you need the original key to decrypt it.

You then perform a Bitwise XOR process on the two binary patterns, the output is the cipher text (output from the encryption). With both letters/characters you write out their ASCII value in binary. You then take the corresponding letter / character from the plain text and the key. This key must be the same length or larger than the plain text. Once you have your plain text (the mnessage) you need to generate a random key. If you have 2 inputs (A & B) then the XOR will produce an output only when A or B have an input BUT NOT BOTH. The Vernam Cipher uses ASCII binary values and the XOR logic gate. The message can then be decrypted with the key and the cipher text.īoth parties would need to meet up to exchange the key, however you can imagine using a random book and starting the message with a page and line number. The plaintext and the key are combined to produce the cipher text. It should be random and be used only once. The Vernam Cipher uses an encryption key (or One Time Pad) which must be equal or longer in characters than the plaintext.
