Caesar cipher

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Revision as of 17:35, 9 August 2008 by imported>Howard C. Berkowitz (New page: {{subpages}} An early and simple substitution cipher was the Caesar cipher, in which each letter in the plaintext was replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions further down t...)
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An early and simple substitution cipher was the Caesar cipher, in which each letter in the plaintext was replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions further down the alphabet. It was named after Julius Caesar who used the cipher with a shift of 3 in order to communicate with his generals during his various military campaigns.

For example, with a shift of 3, "BAD DOG" would become "EDG GRJ". This type of encryption is trivial to cryptanalysis using frequency analysis.