## Section8.6Example: The Cipher Class Hierarchy

Suppose we wish to design a collection of cipher classes, including a Caesar cipher and a transposition cipher.

Because the basic operations used in all forms of encryption are the same, both the Caesar class and the Transpose class will have methods to encrypt and decrypt messages, where each message is assumed to be a string of words separated by spaces. These methods will take a String of words and translate each word using the encoding method that is appropriate for that cipher.

encrypt: Take a sentence and encode each word.
decrypt: take a sentence and decode each word.


In addition to encrypt() and decrypt(), each cipher class will need polymorphic encode and decode methods, which take a single word and encode or decode it according to the rules of that particular cipher.

encode: Take a word and encode it.
decode: take a word and decode it.


### Subsection8.6.1Class Hierarchy

From a design perspective the encrypt() and decrypt() methods will be the same for every class: They simply break the message into words and encode or decode each word.

However, the encode() and decode() methods will be different for each different cipher. The Caesar.encode() method should replace each letter of a word with its substitute, whereas the Transpose.encode() method should rearrange the letters of the word. Given these considerations, how should we design this set of classes?

Because all of the various ciphers will have the same methods, it will be helpful to define a common Cipher superclass (Figure 8.6.1), which will encapsulate those features that the individual cipher classes have in common—the encrypt(), decrypt(), encode(), and decode() methods.

Some of these methods can be implemented in the Cipher class itself. For example, the encrypt() method should take a message in a String parameter, encode each word in the message, and return a String result. The following method definition will work for any cipher:

public String encrypt(String s) {
StringBuffer result = new StringBuffer("");
StringTokenizer words = new StringTokenizer(s);// Tokenize
while (words.hasMoreTokens()) {        // Encode each word
result.append(encode(words.nextToken()) + " ");
}
return result.toString();        // Return result
} // encrypt()


This method creates a local StringBuffer variable, result, and uses StringTokenizer to break the original String into its component words. It uses the encode() method to encode the word, appending the result into result. The result is converted back into a String and returned as the encrypted translation of s, the original message.

If we define encrypt() in the superclass, it will be inherited by all of Cipher's subclasses.

On the other hand, the polymorphic encode() method cannot be implemented within Cipher, because unlike the encrypt() method, which is the same for every Cipher subclass, the encode() method will be different for every subclass.

So, by declaring the encode() method as abstract, we will leave its implementation up to the Cipher subclasses. Thus, within the Cipher class, we would define encode() and decode() as follows:

// Abstract methods
public abstract String encode(String word);
public abstract String decode(String word);


### Subsection8.6.2Class Design: Cipher

Listing 8.6.2 provides the full definition of the Cipher class. The abstract encode() and decode() methods will be implemented by Cipher's subclasses.

Note again that encrypt() and decrypt() call encode() and decode(), respectively. Java's dynamic binding mechanism will take care of invoking the appropriate implementation of encode() or decode(), depending on what type of cipher is involved.

### Subsection8.6.3Algorithm Design: Shifting Characters

The Caesar class (Listing 8.6.3) extends Cipher and implements its own version of encode() and decode().

The encode() method takes a word and returns the result of shifting each of the word's letters. How do we do that? Fortunately, because char data in Java are represented as 16-bit integers. we can use some arithmetic to perform the shift.

For example, the character 'h' has an ASCII code of 104. Adding 3 gives 107, the ASCII code for 'k', which is shifted 3 characters to the right of 'h'.

The problem is this doesn't always work so simply. For example, the ASCII code for 'y' is 121. Adding 3 gives 124, the ASCII code for '|', which is not our desired result. To fix this, what we need to do is “wrap around” to the beginning of the alphabet, so that 'y' gets shifted into 'b'.

In order to accomplish this wrap around we need to do some modular arithmetic. The alphabet has 26 letters and for any positive integer N, N % 26 will always give a number between 0 and 25. If we number the letters 'a' to 'z' as 0 to 25, then 'y' would be 24. Adding 3 gives 27 and 27 % 26 would give 1, which is the letter 'b'. Thus, if we can convert the letters to numbers between 0 and 25, we can use simple arithmetic to perform the shift. This leads to the following algorithm.

For step one of this algorithm we can convert any letter 'a' to 'z' into a number 0 to 25 simply by subtracting the letter 'a' from it:

'a' - 'a' = 0
'b' - 'a' = 1
'c' - 'a' = 2
...
'z' - 'a' = 25


Adding the shift and dividing % 26 gives us a number between 0 and 25. To convert that back into a letter, we can just add the letter 'a' to it and use the (char) cast operator to convert it to a character.

If we combine these steps, we get the following expression for shifting ch by 3:

(char)('a' + (ch -'a'+ 3) % 26)


which breaks down as follows:

ch -'a'                          // Convert to 0 to 25
(ch -'a'+ 3)                     // Add shift
(ch -'a'+ 3) % 26                // Divide % 26
('a' + (ch -'a'+ 3) % 26)        // Add 'a'
(char)('a' + (ch -'a'+ 3) % 26)  // Cast back into a letter


To summarize, we can shift any character by 3 if we map it into the range 0 to 25, then add 3 to it mod 26, then map that result back into the range 'a' to 'z'.

The algorithm for the reverse shift in the decode() method is similar. Accept in this case the reverse Caesar shift is done by shifting by 23, which is $$26-3\text{.}$$ If the original shift is 3, we can reverse that by shifting an additional 23. Together this gives a shift of 26, which will give us back our original letter.

See this code in action below.

#### Activity8.6.1.

Run the code below. Change the text in main to another lowercase string and try again. This code will only work with lowercase letters.

### Subsection8.6.4Class Design: Transpose

The Transpose class (Listing 8.6.5) is structured the same as the Caesar class. It implements both the encode() and decode() methods. The key element here is the transpose operation, which in this case is a simple reversal of the letters in the word. Thus, “hello” becomes “olleh”. This is very easy to do when using the StringBuffer.reverse() method.

The decode() method is even simpler, because all you need to do in this case is call encode(). Reversing the reverse of a string gives you back the original string.

### Subsection8.6.5Testing and Debugging

Listing 8.6.6 provides a simple test program for testing Cipher and its subclasses.

It creates a Caesar cipher and a Transpose cipher and then encrypts and decrypts the same sentence using each cipher. If you run this program, it will produce the following output:

********* Caesar Cipher Encryption *********
PlainText: this is the secret message
Encrypted: wklv lv wkh vhfuhw phvvdjh
Decrypted: this is the secret message
********* Transpose Cipher Encryption *********
PlainText: this is the secret message
Encrypted: siht si eht terces egassem
Decrypted: this is the secret message


See this code in action below.

#### Activity8.6.2.

Run the code below. Change the plain variable in main to another lowercase string and try again. This code will only work with lowercase letters.

#### ExercisesSelf-Study Exercises

##### 1.Caesar Shift.

Modify the Caesar class so that it will allow various sized shifts to be used, instead of just a shift of size 3. (Hint: Use an instance variable in the Caesar class to represent the shift, add a constructor to set it, and change the encode method to use it.)

##### 2.Transpose Rotate.

Modify Transpose.encode() so that it uses a rotation instead of a reversal. That is, a word like “hello” should be encoded as “ohell” with a rotation of one character. (Hint: use a loop to append the letters into a new string)