I had some personal data that I did not want anybody to see. This was stored on my laptop, so I figured there was already a level of security applied. However I wanted to go a bit further. I also wanted to do some programming to help myself out. Therefore I decided to implement a quick Caesar cipher to do the job.Essentially this just replaces each character in the alphabet with another. The result is that text looks jumbled. Regular words turn into meaningless information. Sure with enough data, the cipher translation can be guessed. Then my data would be cracked. However this was a fun exercise.
To map the characters form source to encrypted output, I decided to pick the mappings myself. I kind of zigzagged from one end of the alphabet to the other. For example, any letter A would be replaced by the letter X. Then any letter B would be replaced by the latter D. I kind of alternated from the lower to upper letters in the alphabet as I chose substitutes for my source text. Did this make my cipher any less secure? Who cares. This is just a mickey mouse cipher. It is still good stuff.
My next idea is to write a program to decipher a Caesar cipher. Here is my plan. My program will use brute force, making a guess for the mappings in the cipher. Then it will try to decrypt the text using the guessed mapping. It will compare the output with a dictionary of words. If the guess results in properly spelled words, it will declare victory. Perhaps I can make it faster by building some smarts to make intelligent guesses for the cipher mapping.
