confusion

Confusion stands for mess or confusion and disorder. In communications technology, confusion is one of two basic principles of encryption algorithms, the other principle being diffusion.

The purpose of the confusion method is to make it impossible to reconstruct the relationships between the plaintext and the ciphertext generated via the key. The goal of confusion is to hide redundancies in the plaintext. This can be done by substituting parts of the text with other parts of the text, as in substitution cipher. For example, each letter of the alphabet could be replaced by a certain other letter.