Cryptography

Hey, I was just wondering if there was a technical name for a cipher that is sort of 'composed' of a bunch of other ciphers.

For instance, if you have cipher A, B, C, you could encript the plain text D with A, then encrypt that cipher text with B, then encrypt that with C, and so on.


I'm not really sure how difficult these types of ciphers would be to break. I came up with the idea of a composition cipher while I was in the shower, and, once I write a program for it, I might post an example in the puzzle section, provided that people would be interested in trying it out. Of course, the text would be sufficently long as to make it conceivable to break.

Also, I was wondering if anyone knew of any good introductory books to the subject of cryptography-not cryptanalysis (although that would be great too), but cryptography.

You already have the name, I think: composition cipher, or maybe composition of ciphers. I should point out that certain ciphers (like affine ciphers, for example), when composed, merely turn into another cipher of the same kind, thus not improving the security of the cipher. I have the Stinson book: it seems fairly good.