INVITATION TO CYBERSECURITY 156 Table 7.6 Example double transposition cipher plaintext-to-ciphertext mapping. In the 1876 United States Presidential election between Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes and Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden, political operatives used cryptography to protect the confidentiality of messages they sent over telegraph wires. The election turned out to be extraordinarily close and the results were highly contested. In heated rhetoric both the Republican and Democratic parties accused the other side of election interference. Unfortunately for the Democrats, some of their ciphertext telegrams were preserved and acquired by Whitelaw Reid, the Republican editor of the New York Tribune, who published them in their encrypted form. Soon, Reid, with the help of his readers, was able to crack the Democrats’ ciphers. He published the plaintext under the headline, “The Captured Cipher Telegrams,” exposing a major political scandal. One of the cryptographic schemes used by the Democratic operatives was a partial codebook with word transposition. Table 7.7 shows the ciphertext and decrypted plaintext of one telegram. The damning telegram is about bribing an election official for $200,000 in order to get Tilden elected. Moses was the codeword for Manton Marble, the Democrat operative that sent the telegram. Table 7.7 The ciphertext telegram sent by a Democrat operative in the aftermath of the 1876 United States presidential election and its plaintext decryption. 7.1.4 Combinations Substitution and transposition are the two basic primitives of every cryptographic scheme, ancient and modern, including computer cryptography. The two techniques can be used separately or in combination, either in an additive fashion or as a product. Additive means that the two techniques are used together in some proportion in a single
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=