Cryptography homework in Haskell

This is basically old homework from Stinson's cryptography textbook translated into Haskell. It's not a particularly good demonstration of how to use Haskell or of cryptography. Ignore me.

Cryptographic classes

Since this library is intended for pedagogical purposes, sharing code and sharing implementations as much as possible is a nice thing to have. We want to compare the output of different algorithms and whatnot.

For didactic purposes, there are two interesting things about cryptography: the encryption and decryption algorithms intended for use, and the process of cracking an encryption algorithm. In this project, these two purposes are represented by two type classes: Codec and Crackable.

In an OOP setting, one would expect to see some sort of object which installs a cryptographic algorithm that takes some kind of key object to do the actual processing on characters. In Haskell what I have done instead is built the API around the keys themselves. Every cryptosystem has keys; in this case we're effectively saying that there exist many different types which share nothing except the existence of an encode and a decode function that take a key and a string and encode or decode per the key from the string.

Since this is intended for teaching, I'm using Haskell's ordinary String and Character types, and I've provided convenience functions to help "lift" mod-26 arithmetic into the greater space defined by characters and strings. My purpose is to have the encryption only affect the alphabetic characters. This retains information and severely hampers security, but since we're students and not cryptographers, we benefit from retaining whitespace and punctuation for visual inspection.

Codec

The Codec class defines two methods: encode and decode. Each takes a key and a string. Self-explanatory.

Crackable

The Crackable class defines a single method: crack, which takes a ciphertext and attempts to locate a key or keys that decode it. The bare method here is fairly clunky to use, since you have to specify the type of the key you're looking for, which is why we have this nice bruteForce function and module.

Example usage

Supposing you want to perform an Affine encryption. You make the key and then use encode to produce the ciphertext:

*Crypto> let Just key = affine 3 5
Just (Affine 3 5)

*Crypto> let cipher = encode key "This is a test of the affine cipher"
*Crypto> cipher
"Kadh dh f krhk vu kar fuudsr ldyare"

*Crypto> decode key cipher
"This is a test of the affine cipher"

*Crypto> bruteForce cipher :: (Key, String)
(Key (Affine 3 5),"This is a test of the affine cipher")

BruteForce

The BruteForce module defines a single method, bruteForce, which given a ciphertext attempts to locate a key which decodes it across all the algorithms that are crackable. Taking a page from the regular expression library, you specify what sort of result you want when using it and it will perform the correct action on your behalf. The various alternatives amount to: the key, the plaintext, both, or a list of any of those three options. The function attempts algorithms in order of complexity, so if you are just after the first possible match you'll only pay for the first possibility.

Algorithms

The goal is to implement all the algorithms in the book, but at the moment the following algorithms are implemented:

• Shift (and the Caesar fixed key)
• Affine
• Substitution
• Viginére

The following algorithms are crackable at present:

• Shift
• Affine