Keywords: Starter | Problem Solving | Puzzles | Symmetry

• Wikepedia,
• Monday, August 06, 2007
• "In non-technical usage, a "(secret) code" typically means a "cipher". Within technical discussions, however, the words "code" and "cipher" refer to two different concepts. Codes work at the level of meaning — that is, words or phrases are converted into something else and this chunking generally shortens the message. Ciphers, on the other hand, work at a lower level: the level of individual letters, small groups of letters, or, in modern schemes, individual bits. Some systems used both codes and ciphers in one system, using superencipherment to increase the security.
  
  Historically, cryptography was split into a dichotomy of codes and ciphers, and coding had its own terminology, analogous to that for ciphers: "encoding, codetext, decoding" and so on. However, codes have a variety of drawbacks, including susceptibility to cryptanalysis and the difficulty of managing a cumbersome codebook. Because of this, codes have fallen into disuse in modern cryptography, and ciphers are the dominant technique."

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