Rail Fence Cipher

Index Table

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Introduction

The rail fence cipher is a simple form of transposition cipher. It’s a type of cryptographic algorithm that rearranges the positions of the letters in a message to create a new, seemingly unrelated message. The cipher gets its name from the way we write the message. Applying the rail fence cipher in a given text results in a zigzag pattern, with each letter in a row written out before moving to the next row.

Encryption

  1. Decide on the number of "rails" or rows you want in your cipher grid. For example, if you choose 3 rails, you'll have 3 rows for encrypting your message.
  2. Plaintext is written downwards and diagonally on successive rails of an imaginary fence.When we reach the bottom rail, we traverse upwards moving diagonally, after reaching the top rail, the direction is changed again. Thus the alphabets of the message are written in a zig-zag manner.
  3. After each alphabet has been written, the message is then read off in rows.

Decryption

  1. The number of columns in rail fence cipher remains equal to the length of plain-text message and the key corresponds to the number of rails. With this rail matrix can be constructed accordingly.
  2. Once we’ve got the matrix we can figure-out the spots where texts should be placed using the same way of moving diagonally up and down alternatively.
  3. Then, we fill the cipher-text row wise. After filling it, we traverse the matrix in zig-zag manner to obtain the original text.

Advantages

  1. The rail fence cipher is relatively simple to understand and implement, making it a good choice for basic communication where a higher level of security is not required.
  2. We can manually perform the rail fence cipher without requiring specialized equipment or software.
  3. we can use the rail fence cipher with any number of rows. It allows the user to choose a level of complexity appropriate to their needs.

Disadvantages

  1. The rail fence cipher is not a secure form of encryption, as someone can easily break it with even a basic understanding of cryptography.
  2. Rail fence cipher is not highly effective for longer messages.
  3. Rail fence cipher is vulnerable to certain types of attacks, such as known-plaintext attacks. Therefore, an attacker can easily break the encryption by launching attacks.