A new heuristic based on the cuckoo search for cryptanalysis of substitution ciphers

Abstract

The efficient utilization of one of the latest search heuristic, namely, cuckoo search for automated cryptanalysis (or attack) of substitution ciphers is addressed. A previously proposed genetic algorithm based attack of the simple substitution cipher is enhanced. A comparison is obtained between various attack algorithms that are based on cuckoo search, genetic algorithm, enhanced genetic algorithm, tabu search and scatter search where cuckoo search shows the best performance. It is worth pointing out that the proposed cuckoo search algorithm provides a valid and efficient option for solving similar permutation problems.