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FEATURE
REALSecure
Encrypting with Vigenère
Issue: 8.5 (July/August 2010)
Author: JC Cruz
Author Bio: JC is a freelance technical writer living in British Columbia. His articles appear in various publications such as MacTech, Python Magazine and REALbasic Developer. He also spends quality time with his dear nephew. He can be reached at:
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 52,436
Starting Page Number: 30
Article Number: 8507
Resource File(s):
8507.zip Updated: 2010-07-05 16:14:43
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.umich.edu/~umich/fm-34-40-2/
http://www.simonsingh.net/The_Black_Chamber/vigenere_cipher.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_cipher
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27_principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyalphabetic_cipher
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playfair_cipher
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigen%C3%A8re_cipher
Excerpt of article text...
Here we are once more with another installment of REALSecure. In today's article, we will venture into the field of substitution ciphers. We will study the history behind these ciphers and learn one classic algorithm: the Vigenère cipher. Next, we will implement a modern version of this cipher as a REALbasic class. We will also address some of the cipher's inherent faults. Finally, we will use our cipher class to build a simple encryption tool.
The Need for Encryption
In today's heavily networked society, we face the ever-growing challenge of keeping our privacy. This challenge is further compounded by the presence of dedicated data thieves. These persons have the skills, tools and amoral drive to break into our computer accounts and steal our personal data. To deter these attempts and protect our data, we can restrict access to our accounts to a trusted few. We can store only public data in these accounts, but keep our private data offline. And we can scramble our private data with the use of a
cipher .
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