Assignment 3: Caesar Cipher

Assignment 3: Caesar Cipher

Problem Description:
To send secret messages we use ciphers. A cipher is an algorithm for performing
encryption and decryption. Encryption transforms a plain text into an illegible code,
which can be transformed back to the original message using systematic steps of
decryption. In this lab we will be implementing Caesar’s Cipher.
Caesar cipher is a shift cipher. To encrypt a message each letter in the message is
replaced by another letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. For
example, when we shift alphabet by 2, and wraparound then each alphabet in top
row will be encoded as the corresponding alphabet in the bottom row:
A B C D E F
Y Z A B C D
This may look mundane but the encoded messages are hard to read, for example:
WKH TXLFN EURZQ IRA MXPSV RYHU WKH ODCB GRJ
But if we move each letter back 3 positions we get:
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG
The sender encrypts the message and instead of sending the “shift”, sends the most
frequent alphabet character in the original message. The receiver computes the most
common encrypted alphabet character in the cyphered text and takes the difference
from the most common alphabet character in the original message to figure out the
shift. The sender can retrieve the original message from the cypher by reversing the
shift.
Note: In the case of multiple letters tying as the most frequent in the encoded
message, the alphabet character corresponds to the first occurrence of one of the
most frequent characters.
What You Need to Do:
You are provided with two C files: “main.c” and “lab3.c”. Your primary job is to
complete unfinished functions in “lab3.c” such that we can both encrypt messages
and decrypt them.
Grading:
We will test your program for three main functionalities of the lab: encryption, finding
the most frequent alphabet and decryption.
Deliverables:
For this assignment, you need to complete the unimplemented functions in the lab3.c
file provided to you.
You will commit to your Github repo both the lab3.c file and the main.c file. Place
these files in a new folder called “assignment3” and commit.
You also need to submit these two files to Canvas. (Do not change the lab3.c and
main.c file to .cpp files.)
The Encryption Step Flow Diagram:
Computing the most frequent alphabet:
We want to transmit the message produced from encryption step, but if we give out
the shift as it is, this will compromise our encryption scheme. Therefore, we transmit
the most frequent alphabet of the original message separately to the recipient.
We will build a histogram of alphabets that will record the frequency of each alphabet
in the message. For the data below
A A B A A C C A A C
Histogram is
Index 0 1 2
Frequency 6 1 3
Where indexes map to alphabet
Index Value
0 A
1 B
2 C
The lengths of both the data arrays and histogram array are known in advance.
Furthermore, the data values will be made to map to the indexes of histogram array.
This done by representing A as 0, B as 1 ... and Z as 25. The flow chart below
elaborates the histogram construction.
The largest value in the histogram array should be sent along with the message to
help the decoder.
Decryption of the Encoded Message:
Here we will reuse the code we wrote for the encryption. First we will compute the
most common alphabet in the encrypted message, using the histogram approach.
Secondly we subtract most common alphabet of original message from encrypted
alphabet to compute the shift. Finally, we decrypt the message by re-encrypting it
using the reverse-shift.
Build Histogram: