One way to break a substitution cipher is to use frequency analysis. Let’s focus on the English language for now but the process works the same way for other languages. The character “e” occurs 12.7% in the Eglish language and the letter “t” occurs 9.35% and the letter “a” is 8.2% of the time. So, you can count each character in the ciphered text, compute its frequency and start replacing it. After you complete the first say 4 characters, you may want to change your strategy. Can you explain why you want to stop after the first 4 characters? The two-character “of” is about 4.16% and “to” is about 2%. Now try three characters frequency.
After a period of time, you will be able to decipher most of the text. I am going to ask you to do your first significant homework using frequency analysis.
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