A survey on the Metaheuristics for Cryptanalysis of Substitution and Transposition Ciphers

Abstract

This paper presents state-of-art cryptanalysis studies on attacks of the substitution and transposition ciphers using various metaheuristic algorithms. Traditional cryptanalysis methods employ an exhaustive search, which is computationally expensive. Therefore, metaheuristics have attracted the interest of researchers in the cryptanalysis field. Metaheuristic algorithms are known for improving the search for the optimum solution and include Genetic Algorithm, Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, Particle Swarm Optimization, Differential Evolution, Ant Colony, the Artificial Bee Colony, Cuckoo Search, and Firefly algorithms. The most important part of these various applications is deciding the fitness function to guide the search. This review presents how these algorithms have been implemented for cryptanalysis purposes. The paper highlights the results and findings of the studies and determines the gaps in the literature.