Smart contracts ace as a computer protocol intended to facilitate, verify, or enforce the negation or performance of an agreement.  The process by which smart contracts are implemented occurs within a decentralized environment, thus negating the possibility of human error.  Smart contracts allow for the performance of credible transactions without the necessity of a third party. Using the transfer of value in a smart contract requires the use of a cryptocurrency.  Smart contracts offer many kinds of contractual clauses that may be made partially or entirely self-executing, self-enforcing, or both.  Ethereum describes smart contracts as “applications that run exactly as programmed without the possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud, or third-party interference.”

Cangea has developed a suite of software solutions that provide business, financial institutions, and governments, the ability to incorporate smart contracts into their operations. The Cangea software suite enables users to quickly build and deploy sophisticated Smart Contracts to the Cangea Core™ blockchain without any previous coding experience. The on-chain elements of Cangea are composed of several unique smart contract components that work seamlessly together to create the full functionality of the application.

Learn more on Cangea Smart Contracts

The Vigenère Cipher, created in the 16th century, uses an element not found in a Caesar Cipher: a secret key.  The creator of the code picks any word or combination of letters at random to be the key, for example, “DOG.”  The keyword chosen will then be matched to the plaintext message that you want to encrypt, for example, “ATTACK.”  You can see that the keyword “dog” is shorter than the word “attack” by three letters.  In this case, repeat your key until it matches the number of letters in your plaintext message.  In this case, you would then have “DOGDOG.

Now, you will be able to create the ciphertext.  To do this, you will need to use the chart below.

The columns are the letters of the secret key, while the rows are the letters of the plaintext message.  So for our example, the first letter of our key is “D,” while the first letter of our plaintext word is “A.”  So, find where they intersect on the chart, and you will find the first letter of our ciphertext, which is “D.”  Next, the second letters of our key and plaintext words are “O” and “T” respectively.  They intersect at “H.” You would continue this until you complete all six letters.

Plaintext Message: ATTACK

Key: DOGDOG

Ciphertext: DHZDQQ

Cryptanalysis: Cracking a Vigenère Cipher

Because of the use of a key, the Vigenère Cipher cannot initially be cracked by using a simple frequency analysis like you could do with a Caesar Cipher.  Though, the main weakness of a Vigenère Cipher is the repeating of the key.  So, in our example, “dog” was repeated twice in order to match the number of letters in the word “attack.”  If an attacker guesses the key’s length, it becomes much easier to crack.  The ciphertext is then treated like a series of small Caesar Ciphers, and a method such as frequency analysis could then be performed to crack the code.

But how can an attacker guess the length of the key?  There are actually two methods: the Kasiski examination and the Friedman test.  If the attacker notices that there are repeated segments of text in the ciphertext, a Kasiski examination would be effective in cracking the code.  The attacker would count the distance of letters between repeated text to get a good idea of how long the key is.  The Friedman test takes an algebraic approach utilizing a formula to measure the unevenness of the cipher letter frequencies to break the cipher.  The longer the text, the more accurate this technique is.

Read More on the History of Cryptography

Caesar shifted each letter of his message three letters to the right to produce what could be called the ciphertext. The ciphertext is what the enemy would see instead of the true message. So, for example, if Caesar’s messages were written in the English alphabet, each letter “A” in the message would become a “D,” the “B’s” would become “E’s,” and the “X’s” become “A’s.” This type of cipher is appropriately called a “shift cipher.”

Caesar’s magic number was three, however, a modern day use of the Caesar Cipher is a code called “ROT13.” ROT13, short for “rotate by 13 places,” shifts each letter of the English alphabet 13 spaces. It is often used in online forums to hide information such as movie and tv show spoilers, solutions to puzzles or games, or offensive material. The code is easily crackable, however, it hides the information from the quick glance.
Cryptanalysis: Breaking a Caesar Box
The hardest part of breaking a Caesar Box is figuring out the language of the message that it encodes. Once the code cracker figures this out, two scenarios are considered. Either the “attacker” utilizes a technique such as frequency analysis, or they use what is referred to as a brute force attack.

In the first instance, the attacker knows that certain letters are used more frequently than others. For example, A,E,O, and T are the most commonly used letters, while Q, X, and Z are the least. The relative frequencies of each letter in the English language are shown in the graph below.

If using a simple substitution cipher such as frequency analysis does not crack the code, an attacker could perform a brute force attack.  This kind of attack entails testing each possible shift on a small snippet of the message.  So, if the message is written in English, this would require a maximum of 26 tests since there are 26 letters in the English alphabet.  While this is not a particularly sophisticated attack, it is effective.

We put a spin on the name “Pangea” which is derived from Ancient Greek Language and means “Entire Earth” or “All Land.” Pangea was the name given to the Super Continent when all of the continents once formed one united land mass. We chose this word because we believe that decentralization is key to a unified World and a unified financial ecosystem.

We are focused on developing fin-tech solutions for a unified World. Our goal is to create technology that offers a value proposition that extends across the globe. We are digital pioneers providing the financial industry with new experiences.