Description
For this assignment, you will write a program that can help you encrypt and decrypt files on your computer. Like the
previous homework, the program will have a main menu, which will have the following options:
• e: encrypt a file
Ask the user the name of the file to encrypt. If the file doesn’t exist, or can’t be opened, print an error message,
then go back to the menu. Ask the user the name of the new file encrypted file. If it can’t be opened, print an
error message, and go back to the menu.
If both files are opened successfully, read the characters from the first, file, encrypt them, and write them into the
second file.
• q: quit
When the user quits the program, it should just print a message and exit.
• d: decrypt a file
Ask the user the name of the file to decrypt. If the file doesn’t exist, or can’t be opened, print an error message,
then go back to the menu. Ask the user the name of the new decrypted file. If it can’t be opened, print an error
message, and go back to the menu.
If both files are opened successfully, read the characters from the first, file, decrypt them, and write them into the
second file.
• If a character other than e, q, or d is entered, the player should get an error message and the menu should be
presented again. The user is allowed to enter words that begin with the required letter; for example, quit or
qqqq are both legal entries for q, and your program must handle this. However, your program may assume that
the user will never enter a single input longer than 256 characters (for a filename, password, or command).
Rules
This programming assignment will be graded on style and structure, as well as correctness. First, the use of goto is
prohibited. There should be comments and indentation, variables and functions should have meaningful names, and
the program should have a clear, simple structure.
The programming assignment must be individual work. Do not discuss it with your classmates. Do not share your
solution with anyone, in person or electronically, until the end of the semester. Do not discuss the assignment online,
or copy online solutions. If you are having trouble, please ask one of your instructors or TAs.
Your program will be run through an automated plagiarism checker. If you are found to have cheated on any single
programming assignment, you will receive a 0 on ALL the programming assignments, past and future, so
consider this carefully. Late work on this assignment will be accepted, with a penalty of 20% per day.
Encryption mechanism
The cipher I have developed for this homework is reversible, which means the decryption can be done by reversing
the steps of the encryption. It is slightly more complex than the Vigenere cipher, and much less complex than RC4. It
involves a key file and a password.
• The keyfile is a file that contains 255 unique characters (all the ascii characters) in some scrambled order. You
will be given a keyfile.
• The input file may be any length.
• The password may be any length up to 255.
The encryption process:
• Take the first character from the plain text file
• Add it to the first character from the password
• Take modulo 255 of the sum to get a number between 0 and 254
• Use that number as an index into the keyfile to find the encrypted character.
• Keep going until the end of the plain text file (add second char from file to second char of password, and so on)
• If the end of the password is reached, start over at the first character of the password.
The decryption process is just the opposite:
• Take the first character from the encrypted file.
• Find its index in the keyfile
• Take that index and subtract the first password character from it
• Take modulo 255 of that result to get the plain text character
• Keep going until the end of the encrypted file (using second char of password, and so on)
• If the end of the password is reached, start over at the first character of the password.
For example, suppose the original file contains “TEST TEXT” and your password is “pass”, and the keyfile contains
the values as shown below:
Plain text T (84) E (69) S (83) T (84) (32) T (84) E (69) X (88) T (84)
Password (repeated as needed) p (112) a (97) s (115) s (115) p (112) a (97) s (115) s (115) p (112)
(sum of 2 chars) % 255 196 166 198 199 144 181 184 203 196
Encrypted text (from keyfile) : X 8 7 N I F 3 :
144 166 181 182 183 184 196 197 198 199 203
… N … X … I F … : 8 7 … 3 …
Encrypted text : X 8 7 N I F 3 :
Index from key file 196 166 198 199 144 181 184 203 196
Password (repeated as needed) p a s s p a s s p
(index – pass char) % 255 -> original T E S T T E X T
Programming requirements
You must write functions for doing the encryption and decryption, with the following signatures:
void encrypt( FILE *fin, FILE *fout, char subarr[], char pass[] );
void decrypt( FILE *fin, FILE *fout, char subarr[], char pass[] );
The input and output files should be opened and checked for validity before calling encrypt or decrypt. You must pass
in the character substitution array (keyfile info) and password.
Another function that must be written is a function for reading the keyfile, (hardcode the filename to “key.255”).
You may choose the details of that function yourself.
Before showing the user the menu, you must ask the user for the password. The same password is used to
encrypt/decrypt all the files during one session.
Programming details
This program, like many of the exercises you have done, involves you treating ascii characters as numbers. But we
use a keyfile of length 255, and half of those values are considered to be negative numbers (128-254), if not carefully
cast. Make sure you consistently use chars as the values you deal with, AND whenever the chars are used as their
integer values, cast them as (unsigned char) so they are not seen as negative, for example:
enc_key[(unsigned char) c] = i;
dec_key[(unsigned char) i] = c;
It is not required for you to understand why this happens, but those of you who do want to know more, please see the
notes at the end of this file.
The encryption and decryption algorithms require that characters from the keyfile must be looked up in 2 different
ways:
• know the index – get the character (for encryption)
• know the character – get the index (for decryption)
It is recommended (but not required) that you store the keyfile data in both ways, in 2 character arrays, each of length
255. Since the keyfile contains 255 distinct values, which are 0 to 254, this is possible. Suppose the keyfile was just 8
characters long, containing the values 0 to 7: 43756201, you would create 2 arrays, like this:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
4 3 7 5 6 2 0 1
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
6 7 5 1 0 3 4 2
Newline characters are even more troublesome for this program than the last one, and you must keep them in mind. A
filename cannot have a newline at the end; the password should not include a newline either.
Example User I/O
The following exchange shows correct behavior for the program. The red shows user input. As in the previous
homework, please include the word shown in bold caps in your program’s output. Each line must end in a newline,
including the last line, and do not include any extra lines.
WELCOME to the encryption service.
ENTER your password
abc123
MENU: ncode, ecode, or uit
e
ENTER a file to encrypt
cats.c
ENTER a filename for the encrypted file.
cats.c.enc
MENU: ncode, ecode, or uit
d
ENTER a file to decrypt
cats.c.enc
ENTER a filename for the decrypted file.
cats2.c
MENU: ncode, ecode, or uit
v
UNRECOGNIZED v
MENU: ncode, ecode, or uit
eeeee
ENTER a file to encrypt
nofile.txt
CANNOT open nofile.txt
MENU: ncode, ecode, or uit
quit
BYE!
Extra (not required) information about negative numbers
The char type is 1 byte (8 bits) long, so it can represent the numbers 0-255. The simple ascii characters are in the
range 0-127 (00000000-01111111). We want to use the next set of values, 128-255, or all the values where the
most significant bit is 1 (10000000-11111111). Doing this gives a wider range of characters used in the
encrypted file.
The problem is when a char, an 8-bit value, is interpreted as a number. The most significant bit is used to indicate a
negative number when it is 1. You may try the following code:
char c = 129;
printf( “%c %i %i”, c, c, (unsigned char) c );
You can see that even though you set the value to 129 (10000001), it gets printed as -127. Only if you specifically
say (unsigned char), can all 8 bits get included as part of the number. Another question is, if a 1 in the first bit
means negative, then why is 10000001 printed as -127 and not -1? Computers use a representation called two’s
complement for negative numbers. You may read about this online.
So anywhere you want to use a char variable as a full 8-bit value, you must cast it to (unsigned char).
You might have noticed that the keyfile used in this homework is only 255 (0-254) characters long, rather than 256.
This is because the value of the EOF constant is 255 (11111111), so it has to be excluded from being in the plaintext
and encrypted files, because it is returned by the getc family of functions. These functions all return a char, so a
character had to be reserved to indicate the end of file, and 255 was chosen by the developers since it is a special
value, and not in the ascii range. If I hadn’t left out that character from the keyfile, then this same encryption
mechanism could be used for any file, not just ascii text files. Some binary files may include characters with the
value 255 in their contents, so getc functions are not appropriate for dealing with them. We haven’t discussed those
issues yet in this class.
