Sounds on key equivocation for simple substitution ciphers

Abstract

The equivocation of the key for a simple substitution cipher is upper and lower hounded, when the message source is memoryless. The hounds are shown to be exponentially tight. The results are compared with random ciphering. It is observed that the exponential behavior of the equivocation of the key is not determined by the redundancy in the message source, but by the symbol probabilities which are closest in a certain sense.