In plain words: A system that figures out how letters were scrambled by studying coded text and normal text separately, without ever seeing matching pairs, then decodes new messages. It cracked simple shift and repeating-key ciphers accurately even with far larger word lists than earlier attempts.
Abstract · Unsupervised Cipher Cracking Using Discrete GANs
This work details CipherGAN, an architecture inspired by CycleGAN used for inferring the underlying cipher mapping given banks of unpaired ciphertext and plaintext. We demonstrate that CipherGAN is capable of cracking language data enciphered using shift and Vigenere ciphers to a high degree of fidelity and for vocabularies much larger than previously achieved. We present how CycleGAN can be made compatible with discrete data and train in a stable way. We then prove that the technique used in CipherGAN avoids the common problem of uninformative discrimination associated with GANs applied to discrete data.
Aidan N. Gomez, Sicong Huang, Ivan Zhang, Bryan M. Li, Muhammad Osama, Lukasz Kaiser
arXiv:1801.04883 · cs.LG · submitted Jan 15, 2018
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