Classic Cryptography: Atbash

Atbash
Atbash is a simple substitution very similar in nature to the Caesar Substitution. Whereas the Caesar substitution was Roman in origin, atbash is Jewish in origin. In atbash, the last letter represents the first, the second to last represents the second and so on. Atbash is even simpler to solve than the Caesar Substitution as there is only one solution to try.

PLAINTEXT    abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
CIPHERTEXT   ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

Some have taken the Atbash technique and mixed it with the Caesar technique. One might think that breaking such a cipher technique would be hard. With the aid of digital computers today, such a cipher could be broken within seconds on your home PC by a brute force attack. How could a monoalphabetic substitution be solved if we do not know whether the cipher alphabet is atbash, caesar, some combination of the two or just random? This is addressed in the monoalphabetic substitution section.