Can Sequence-to-Sequence Models Crack Substitution Ciphers?

12/30/2020

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by   Nada Aldarrab, et al.

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13

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Decipherment of historical ciphers is a challenging problem. The language of the target plaintext might be unknown, and ciphertext can have a lot of noise. State-of-the-art decipherment methods use beam search and a neural language model to score candidate plaintext hypotheses for a given cipher, assuming plaintext language is known. We propose an end-to-end multilingual model for solving simple substitution ciphers. We test our model on synthetic and real historical ciphers and show that our proposed method can decipher text without explicit language identification and can still be robust to noise.