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| | Key concepts: the science of secrecy | LRB essay | Guardian Unlimited Books |
 | | For several centuries, the Vigen*re cipher gloried under the title of 'chiffre indèchiffrable', only to fall in the middle of the 19th century to the efforts of a retired Prussian officer, Friedrich Kasiski, and, independently, to the English inventor Charles Babbage. |
 | | The cipher's weak point, it turned out, was not its encoding strategy, but the length of the key (usually a single word or phrase) which has to be repeated many times until it covers the message if it's to designate an alphabet for each plaintext letter. |
 | | Any repeat or duplication gives decrypters a toehold, and both Kasiski and Babbage exploited this to reduce the polyalphabetic coding to an interweaving of monoalphabetic ones, each of which could then be cracked by analysing the letter frequency. |
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