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CAM00850

Playfair cipher used in the movie

The Playfair cipher or Playfair square or Wheatstone-Playfair cipher is a manual symmetric encryption technique and was the first literal digram substitution cipher. The scheme was invented in 1854 by Charles Wheatstone, but bears the name of Lord Playfair for promoting its use.

The technique encrypts pairs of letters (bigrams or digrams), instead of single letters as in the simple substitution cipher and rather more complex Vigenère cipher systems then in use. The Playfair is thus significantly harder to break since the frequency analysis used for simple substitution ciphers does not work with it[1].

The playfair cipher used in the movie was ME IK QO TX CQ TE ZX CO MW QC TE HN FB IK ME HA KR QC UN GI KM AV with a keyword "DEATH" given as a riddle: "The debt that all men pay".

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