security in computing

January 5th, 2009
  • Suppose a six-symbol alphabet is used for encryption, and the relative frequencies of the six ciphertext symbols (denoted a, b, c, d, e, f) are 1/4, 1/4, 3/16, 1/8, 1/8, and 1/16, respectively. Compute the variance of this system. Compute the index of coincidence for this system.


  • For both questions I use the reference: http://www.mth.uea.ac.uk/~h320/ciphpdf.pdf . The variance of a cryptosystem seems to be defined by the sum of the squares of the differences of the actual frequencies from the mean frequencies. In this case, since there are 6 symbols, the mean frequency is 1/6, and the variance is: 2*(1/4-1/6)^2 + (3/16-1/6)^2 + 2*(1/8 - 1/6 ) ^ 2 + (1/16-1/6)^2 = .02865 There are many references to "index of coincidence", including several sites that offer index-of-coincidence calculators, such as: http://www.central.edu/homepages/LintonT/classes/spring01/cryptography/java/trueic.html and Most of these definitions are phrased in terms of the index of coincidence of a specific ciphertext. At any rate, the definition of index of coincidence in this case is simply the sum of the squares of the frequencies: 2*(1/4 ^2) + (3/16)^2 + 2*(1/8^2)+1/16^2 = 0.1953 This represents the probability that two randomly chosen characters in a large ciphertext will be the same. Search terms: "index of coincidence" ciphertext variance ciphertext







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