Abstract
Given a natural language cleartext and a ciphertext obtained by Huffman coding, the problem of guessing the code is shown to be NP-complete for various variants of the encoding process.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Fraenkel, A. S., Mor, M., and Perl, Y., Is text compression by prefixes and suffixes practical?Acta Inform.,20 (1983), 371–389.
Garey, M. R., and Johnson, D. S.,Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness, Freeman, San Francisco, 1979.
Huffman, D., A method for the construction of minimum redundancy codes,Proc. IRE,40 (1952), 1098–1101.
Klein, S. T., Bookstein, A., and Deerwester, S., Storing text retrieval systems on CD-ROM: compression and encryption considerations,ACM Trans. Inform. Systems,7 (1989), 230–245.
Rubin, F., Experiments in text file compression,Comm. ACM,19 (1976), 617–623.
Rubin, F., Cryptographic aspects of data compression codes,Cryptologia,3 (1979), 202–205.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
Communicated by Alberto Apostolico.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fraenkel, A.S., Klein, S.T. Complexity aspects of guessing prefix codes. Algorithmica 12, 409–419 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01185434
Received:
Revised:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01185434