Crank, or the "CRyptANalysis toolKit", is a program designed to provide automated cryptanalysis of classical pen and paper cryptosystems (an example of which might be the Caesar cipher, where each letter is substituted by the letter three places along in the alphabet). Because the mechanisms for decryption (authorised or otherwise) are similar to encryption, Crank also doubles as a cryptographic typewriter, where you can see messages being encrypted on the fly as you type.
When attempting an automated attack, the task is viewed as an optimisation problem. The quantity to be optimised is the "plaintextness" of the, er, plaintext, the latter being computed from the ciphertext using an instance of a cryptographic system. This instance is a transformation (called a "transform" by Crank), usually specified by a key, that maps a text string to another text string. The optimiser works over the space of keys of the transformation, trying to increase the "plaintextness", or in Crank terminology, "fitness" of the resultant candidate decrypted plaintext. The method the optimiser uses to search the keyspace is called the "heuristic".
The purpose of Crank is therefore twofold; first, to provide a library of transform, fitness and heuristic "componants", and second to allow them to be combined together and used in the cryptanalysis of a cryptogram.
Most of Crank's cryptanalytic functionality is placed in componants, which the rest of the program is designed to manipulate.
A componant should be thought of not as a specific item, but as a group or class of them, where there can be many instances of a componant, each seperate and unique in its own right (this is the same idea as "class vs object" in OOP). When manipulating componants in Crank, you are in fact working with instances of these componant classes, creating, modifying, deleting and linking them together.
An instance of a componant is described by a set of parameters that determine its behaviour. To all intents and purposes, an instance is identical to the values of its parameters (though you can have several duplicate instances with the same values). A componant contains a public table describing the number and type of the parameters its instances use. This allows generic componants to work with the internals of an instance without knowing the details beforehand. For example, a genetic algorithm could configure itself to work with any type of transformation, just by reading the associated transform's parameter table.
Transform componants are intended to correspond roughly to a cipher scheme. More accurately, they are meant to represent the decryption side of a cryptosystem, but in many classical ciphers encryption and decryption are strongly related (for example, the way to decrypt a message encrypted using a monoalphabetic substitution cipher is to encrypt again using the inverse key). At the most basic level, instances of these componants describe a mapping from any text string to another text string.
Like all componants, transform instances have parameter state. In this case, the set of parameters of a transform is called the key. Almost all ciphers use keys to specify transformations and put the security of the system into keeping the key secret (for example, in a Vigenère system, the details of how encryption is performed is well known, but the word used to assign alphabets is the secret key). If the key is discovered, ciphertext can be read. Crank tries to optimise transform instances in order to recover the key.
Fitness componants describe classes of fitness functions. A fitness function measures how close a given text string is to plaintext. In Crank, fitness functions give outputs that are real numbers, with lesser values indicating that the text has a better chance of being plaintext. The actual values themselves aren't important, but the relative ordering of them is. If one text string produces 0.0001 and another produces 1000000.0, all you can deduce is that the first string is more likely to be plaintext.
A heuristic componant represents an algorithm which is used to search the keyspace of a transformation. It uses a fitness instance to score the success of each candidate transform instance on the cryptogram in question. At the termination of the algorithm, it will return the best key found, which if it has been successful, should decrypt the cryptogram to plaintext.
User interface componants are not used directly in the optimisation process; rather, instances allow the viewing and editing of parameters of other instances in a user-friendly manner. They can be specific, applying only to one componant, or generic, applying to any. Within Crank, each time you work with a transform, heuristic or fitness componant, you will probably also need to specify a user interface componant for it.
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