<s>[INST] Do affine ciphers have any modern use cases? [/INST] Yes, affine ciphers are still used as a form of encryption in modern cryptography. They are often used to encrypt small amounts of data, such as passwords and small messages. They can also be used as a basic form of steganography, where a message is hidden within another message.</s>\ <s>[INST] How are affine ciphers used in modern applications? From my understanding, they are relatively easy to brute force using modern computing to find the original message. [/INST] The Affine cipher is a very insecure cipher, with the Caesar cipher possibly being the only easier cipher to crack. The Affine cipher is a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, so all the methods that are used to cryptanalyse substitution ciphers can be used for the affine cipher. Affine ciphers can also be cracked if any 2 characters are known.

Therefore the use in modern applications should be avoided if strong encryption is the goal. For purely the sake of obfuscating plain text, it may have use - however better alternatives (like Advanced Encryption Standard, short AES) exist. Thanks to libraries, they are no harder to implement. Therefore affine ciphers should have no use in modern applications.</s>