mrandrewmills/substitution-cipher

JavaScript object for playing with simple monoalphabetic substitution ciphers.

Hi there 👋

substitution-cipher's Issues

auto initialize cipherAlphabet when keyword is created?

Currently, you have to invoke buildKeyword() and then buildCipherAlphabet() before you can start encrypting or decrypting. I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better/easier to have buildKeyword() automatically trigger buildCipherAlphabet() automatically.

Thoughts?

encrypt() and decrypt() - better handling of non-alphas?

Currently, any non-alphabetical character gets converted into a space by the encrypt() and decrypt() methods. So, apostrophes, quotes, hyphens, periods, all of that, gets turned into a space character.

How do real-life substitution ciphers handle such things? Need to do more research.

rename distillUniqueUpperAlphas?

Since distillUniqueUpperAlphas is intended to be an internal/private utility function, shouldn't it be renamed to _distillUniqueUpperAlphas?

refactor common code in buildKeyword and buildCipherAlphabet methods

The buildKeyword() and buildCipherAlphabet() methods share a decent amount of repeated code. This should be put into a separate function to adhere to DRY principle.

JSLint complains about negation character in regex of distillUpperUniqueAlphas

There's a regex formula in the distillUpperUniqueAlphas that JSLint is complaining about as being potentially insecure.

phrase = phrase.replace(/[^a-zA-Z]/g, "");

If we can find another way to filter out non-alpha characters that JSLint won't complain about, I'd prefer it. If we can't, then we can't.

add JSDoc output?

Just a note to remind myself to create and add JSDoc output later, as time permits.

Remove/Add Spaces

I propose adding two new methods to this class.

The first method would be removeSpaces(). It would filter out any spaces between words, and make it harder for cryptanalysis to identify one or two letter words, which would increase the difficulty of the ciphertext.

The second method would be addSpace(number). It would iterate through the ciphertext characters and add a space at the interval specified in the method argument. So, addSpace(5) would add a space every fifth character, addSpace(1) would add a space between every character.