From Ancient Rome to Modern Security: Evolving the Caesar Cipher for Today's Threat Landscape
Authors
Stapleton, Eimeara
Issue Date
2024
Degree
MSc in Cybersecurity
Publisher
Dublin Business School
Rights holder
Rights
Abstract
In today’s world our privacy is constantly under threat. We are faced with threats from bad actors both of whom could steal confidential information or modify or delete it. This means that cryptography is more important than ever .Cryptography encodes messages which make them undecipherable to anyone but the reader.(Salmi and Siagian, 2022,p99.
Aim The aim of this dissertation is to explore the evolution of the Caesar cipher, analyse its vulnerabilities in the context of modern cybersecurity threats, and propose enhancements or adaptations that make it more resilient in today's threat landscape. The method involved comparing and contrasting different algorithms to the original Caesar Cipher which involved the setting up of a suitable artefact for their implementation in pycharm. The Robustness of each algorithm was also tested in pycharm with brute forcing and known plaintext attacks as well as Cryptanalysis tools such as Crank and Cryptool2. The results showed that out of the four algorithms proposed to solve the weakness of the Caesar Cipher the Combined Caesar was the strongest while the Caesar Cipher expanded with number and the Caesar Cipher with Euler totient proved to be weak and lacking in security.