CISSP · Question #660
Which of the following is the reason that transposition ciphers are easily recognizable?
The correct answer is D. Character. Transposition ciphers rearrange the characters of plaintext without changing them, making them recognizable because the original characters (and their frequencies) are preserved in the ciphertext.
Question
Which of the following is the reason that transposition ciphers are easily recognizable?
Options
- AKey
- BBlock
- CStream
- DCharacter
How the community answered
(54 responses)- A2% (1)
- C4% (2)
- D94% (51)
Why each option
Transposition ciphers rearrange the characters of plaintext without changing them, making them recognizable because the original characters (and their frequencies) are preserved in the ciphertext.
A key is a parameter used in both transposition and substitution ciphers to control encryption, but it is not the identifying reason why transposition ciphers are easily recognizable.
Block refers to a cipher mode that processes fixed-size chunks of data, which is a structural classification of modern symmetric ciphers and is unrelated to why transposition ciphers are recognizable.
Stream refers to a cipher type that encrypts data one bit or byte at a time continuously, which is a different cipher category and not the reason transposition ciphers are easily identified.
Transposition ciphers work by reordering characters rather than substituting them, so the same characters from the plaintext appear in the ciphertext. This means frequency analysis can easily identify the cipher type because the character distribution matches natural language patterns, making transposition ciphers relatively easy to recognize and break.
Concept tested: Transposition cipher recognition via character frequency analysis
Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/encryption-overview
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