Cryptography and Cryptanalysis in MS EXCEL

Abstract

This paper provides implementations of three well-known ciphers – Caesar Cipher, Vigenere Cipher and Hill Cipher in Microsoft Excel. It is shown how the ciphers can be broken by using Brute-force Attack, Frequency Analysis Attack and Known-plaintext Attack. For the purpose of the cryptanalysis the relative occurrence frequencies of the letters and the index of coincidence (κ ) in Bulgarian language are determined. The classical Frequency Analysis Attack is modified using the cross-correlation between frequencies of letters in the natural language and the cipher text. Modular matrix operations in MS Excel are shown.