Cryptanalysis of Vigenere cipher using Cuckoo Search
Since the key space of Vigenere cryptosystem is very large, therefore, brute force does not help in the analysis of the cryptosystem in real time. Statistical techniques are also not helpful when the key size is not small. The aim of this work was to examine the feasibility of Cuckoo Search algorithm as a cryptanalysis tool of classical cryptosystems especially Vigenere cipher. We applied Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization and Cuckoo Search techniques for the analysis of Vigenere cipher. After doing lots of experiments we observed that GA and PSO techniques can recover the entire key of Vigenere Cipher correctly for keys of small lengths. However, Cuckoo Search can recover more than 90% of the key characters for keys of size up to 25 characters because GA and PSO get trapped in local minima while Cuckoo Search finds the global optimum solution following characteristics of Lvy flights. Experimental results show the superiority of CS in fast convergence and the accuracy in the cryptanalysis of Vigenere cipher over PSO and GA.
cryptanalysis vigenere cipher cuckoo search genetic algorithm particle swarm optimization