4 kyu

Vigenère Cipher Helper

3,455 of 8,564jacobb

Description:

The Vigenère cipher is a classic cipher originally developed by Italian cryptographer Giovan Battista Bellaso and published in 1553. It is named after a later French cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère, who had developed a stronger autokey cipher (a cipher that incorporates the message of the text into the key).

The cipher is easy to understand and implement, but survived three centuries of attempts to break it, earning it the nickname "le chiffre indéchiffrable" or "the indecipherable cipher."

From Wikipedia:

The Vigenère cipher is a method of encrypting alphabetic text by using a series of different Caesar ciphers based on the letters of a keyword. It is a simple form of polyalphabetic substitution.

. . .

In a Caesar cipher, each letter of the alphabet is shifted along some number of places; for example, in a Caesar cipher of shift 3, A would become D, B would become E, Y would become B and so on. The Vigenère cipher consists of several Caesar ciphers in sequence with different shift values.

Assume the key is repeated for the length of the text, character by character. Note that some implementations repeat the key over characters only if they are part of the alphabet -- this is not the case here.

The shift is derived by applying a Caesar shift to a character with the corresponding index of the key in the alphabet.

Visual representation:

"my secret code i want to secure"  // message
"passwordpasswordpasswordpasswor"  // key

Write a class that, when given a key and an alphabet, can be used to encode and decode from the cipher.

Example

var alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz';
var key = 'password';

// creates a cipher helper with each letter substituted
// by the corresponding character in the key
var c = new VigenèreCipher(key, alphabet);

c.encode('codewars'); // returns 'rovwsoiv'
c.decode('laxxhsj');  // returns 'waffles'

Any character not in the alphabet must be left as is. For example (following from above):

c.encode('CODEWARS'); // returns 'CODEWARS'
Algorithms
Ciphers
Security
Object-oriented Programming
Strings

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Stats:

CreatedJan 11, 2014
PublishedJan 12, 2014
Warriors Trained28727
Total Skips9226
Total Code Submissions107473
Total Times Completed8564
JavaScript Completions3455
CoffeeScript Completions55
Python Completions4665
PHP Completions447
Java Completions39
Total Stars895
% of votes with a positive feedback rating90% of 1100
Total "Very Satisfied" Votes924
Total "Somewhat Satisfied" Votes136
Total "Not Satisfied" Votes40
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