The original square used the Greek alphabet laid out as follows: Letters are represented by two numbers from one to five, allowing the representation of 25 characters using only 5 numeric symbols. There are no surviving tablets from antiquity. The device partitioned the alphabet into five tablets with five letters each (except for the last one with only four). Basic form Īccording to Polybius' Histories, the device was invented by Cleoxenus and Democleitus, and further developed by Polybius himself. The device was originally used for fire signalling, allowing for the coded transmission of any message, not just a finite amount of predetermined options as was the convention before. The device is used for fractionating plaintext characters so that they can be represented by a smaller set of symbols, which is useful for telegraphy, steganography, and cryptography. The Polybius square, also known as the Polybius checkerboard, is a device invented by the ancient Greeks Cleoxenus and Democleitus, and made famous by the historian and scholar Polybius. Then you just have to find the correspondence basing on the occurrence rate of the encrypted text.Type of code The Greek letters of a Polybius square Since we know the average frequencies of letters occurrence into a large number of languages. You just need to make a statistic analysis of letters frequencies into the encrypted text (or numbers here). The decryption process of Polybius Square, as all the others monoalphabetic ciphers, is really simple. American soldiers also would have used it into prisons. The problem was that Cyrillic alphabet contained often more than 30 letters (depending on which alphabet we're talking about). According to the "legend", Polybius square cipher would have been used by russian nihilists jailed into the Tsar cells toĬommunicate. Moreover, this cipher allow people to communicate by knocking on any surface (like morse code). The numeric codes composing this cipher was so translated using torches, which wasn't easy because you needed ten torches to transmit This substitution cipher was first created to improve "long distance" transmission techniques. Then the rest of the grid will be filled with the other letters that wasn't used into the key, in alphabetical order. This key will be placed at the beginning of the grid, It's also possible to add a secret key when you encrypt the data, so it will improve the cipher security (even though it's now very unreliable to encrypt data with such a cipher). "B" will be replaced by "12" because it is on the first line but second column, and so on. "A" will so be represented by "11" in the cipher. For instance, the "A" letter will be the first in the grid, into theįirst line and first column. Then, we just have to replace the input's letters by the two numbers in the grid that represent its coordinates. We fill the grid startingĪt the top left corner, ending at the bottom right. In english it's the "J" or "I" that is being excluded. For instance in french we take out the "W" letter. This letterĪctually depends on which language is used to encrypt or decrypt the input. As you see, there's only 25 boxes in the grid, which mean that we will need to exclude one letter. There's also a 36 boxes variant which allow the user to encrypt numbers too. The principle isįirst, we fill a 25's boxes grid (5 by 5). Polybius square took its name from its creator, Polybius (greek historian who lived around 200 to 125 BC). The encryption process - unlike the polyalphabetical ciphers (such as Vigenere cipher for instance). This kind of ciphers are named like that because they proceed by substitute the input letters by always the same values during all Polybius Square is a substitution cipher, also known as monoalphabetical cipher.
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