Reply To: Optimising a stochastic hill climbing attack?
@pufferfish101007 Just to add, for some of the cyphers, interestingly, there can be MORE THAN ONE key that gives the correct plain text solution, hence not always getting stuck in local maxima. This is particularly the case for Playfair, Bifid, ADFGVX and similar encryption methods. For example, 2013’s 8B challenge which was a Playfair cypher has an official decrypt key of “ADLERBCFGHIKMNOPQSTUVWXYZ”. I found this with a dictionary word attack. However when hill climbing I also found that “ZXUWVSQMPNROTEHLKFIGDCYBA”, “QMSPNOTREHXUZWVKFLIGCYDBA” and “ACBYDNQPMSGKIFLHOETRVXWUZ” all give the same plain text solution. There are no doubt some other solutions too.