Product Cipher

product cipher, data encryption scheme in which the ciphertext produced by encrypting a plaintext document is subjected to further encryption. By combining two or more simple transposition ciphers or substitution ciphers, a more secure encryption may result.

In the days of manual cryptography, product ciphers were a useful device for cryptographers, and in fact double transposition or product ciphers on key word-based rectangular matrices were widely used. There was also some use of a class of product ciphers known as fractionation systems, wherein a substitution was first made from symbols in the plaintext to multiple symbols (usually pairs, in which case the cipher is called a biliteral cipher) in the ciphertext, which was then encrypted by a final transposition, known as superencryption. One of the most famous field ciphers of all time was a fractionation system, the ADFGVX cipher employed by the German army during World War I. This system used a 6 × 6 matrix to substitution-encrypt the 26 letters and 10 digits into pairs of the symbols A, D, F, G, V, and X. The resulting biliteral cipher was then written into a rectangular array and route encrypted by reading the columns in the order indicated by a key word, as illustrated in the figure.

The great French cryptanalyst Georges J. Painvin succeeded in cryptanalyzing critical ADFGVX ciphers in 1918, with devastating effect for the German army at the Second Battle of the Marne.