Assembly Vigenère cipher program - c

Question

I'm not really sure how to approach this problem:
For better frequency characteristics the keyword should not have any repeated
letters. Also, if it contains the letter A the encrypted letter will be the same as the plaintext, although this is not necessarily a bad thing.
To implement this algorithm with a pencil and paper, many descriptions ask you tobuild a Vigenère Square. However this is not really necessary when you are using acomputer to do the encoding and decoding.
Essentially the keyword is written repeatedly over and over above the plaintext.
Suppose the keyword is CRYPTOGRAM.
CRYPTOGRAMCRYPTOGRAMCRYPTOGRAMCRYPTOGRAMCRYPTOGRAMCRYPTOGRAMCRYPTOGR
WEHAVEBEENBETRAYEDALLISDISCOVEREDFLYATONCEMEETUSBYTHEOLDTREEATNINEPM
Consider that the letters are numbered 0 to 25. The letter on the top determines
which Caesar-cypher to use for the letter below. Thus C means shift the alphabet by 2, A means shift by 0, and so on. In mathematical terms, we are adding the two letters together modulo 26. (The square was used because the concept of modular arithmetic was not generally understood by soldiers in 1553.)
To decrypt the message, the same operation is performed in reverse. That is, the
value of the keyword letter is subtracted rather than added. Step 3. What your code should do
Your code should use STDIN and STDOUT for input and output. (This is the
default.) Use redirection on the command line to read from a file and write to a
file.
Your code should open a file, read it character by character and save it into an
array.
When you get to the end of the file you should encode the contents of the
array with a Vigenère cipher using the keyword CRYPTOGRAM, then print it
out.
Maintain the distinction between upper-case and lower-case letters, and do
not modify non-alphabetic characters. This is not very good for the security of
your message, but the result will look neater.
This program should use glibc functions. In addition to printf(), you may
need getchar() and putchar().
Assume that the input file contains just ASCII text Don't worry about what
happens with non-text files.
Once the encoder is working, build a decoder by duplicating the code and
changing the addition to a subtraction.
If you use printf() to output the array, remember that a null termination is
required on a string.

Answer 1

Start by breaking the problem down in smaller parts like "read input from stdin", "encrypt a string", "print output to stdout".
You need to be familiar with the modulus operator, because you will need to use it more than once in your program.
If you are having a hard time, here is one way to break down the problem
(there are other ways that are just as good):
/* For printf, getchar etc: */
#include <stdio.h>
/* For isalpha, isupper, islower etc: */
#include <ctype.h>
char encryptChar(char ch, char cypher) {
int shiftBy = cypher - 'A';
char encryptedLetter;
/* There are 3 cases: uppercase, lowercase, other char */
if (isupper(ch)) {
/* add code to encrypt uppercase char */
} else if (islower(ch)) {
/* add code to encrypt lowercase char */
} else {
/* Other characters stay as they are */
encryptedLetter = ch;
}
return encryptedLetter;
}
char *cypherString = "CRYPTOGRAM";
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
int ch;
int cypherStringLength = strlen(cypherString);
int counter = 0;
char cypher;
while ((ch = getchar()) != EOF) {
cypher = cypherString[counter%cypherStringLength];
ch = encryptChar(ch, cypher);
/* Add code to print the character */
counter++;
}
return 0;
}