Suppose we are using a method of encryption that does as much as possible to hide any patterns of a file, including symbol frequencies. And suppose we also want to compress the same file. In terms of the compression performance (the size of compressed file), is it better to compress the file before encrypting it, or encrypt the file before compressing it? Briefly explain the reason

The hacker group Desdeia tries to break our old weak cipher which we used for the communication with the Duchess of Ligovia. It's generally known that an actual breaking of the cipher needs the reviewing a huge amount of variants which probably lasts a couple of months. Additionally we know that the reviewing of different variants needs always the same server resource. Using our intelligence sources we tried to get some information about the actual progress of breaking, but we got only some fragments: • The hacker group Desdeia uses for breaking their powerful four-core server which resources are fully dedicated to breaking process. . The actual breaking process began exactly at noon, but we don't know, on which day. . By the noon of 2nd of April, already 648,467,673 variants were successfully reviewed. Exactly at this noon, when the breaking process was already lasted for 19 days, it was attempted to double the server speed. The doubling itself was failed, but instead of it there was…

8. Also, in the Caesar cipher you could not encrypt two different letters to be the same letter (meaning if “p" → "S" then nothing else can go to “S"). Is this true of the Vigen'ere cipher too?

I need help with the following problems in cryptography. A. Encrypt the message “Freedom” using the Playfair matrix M F H I K U N O P Q Z V W X Y E L A R G D S T B C T B. Construct the Playfair matrix with the keyword “LARGEST” and encrypt the message “Freedom” again. C. Compare the results obtained in A and B. How do you account for these results?