Secret codes & Ciphers

Have you ever needed to send letter's and messages that are on strict a need to know basis, But your not quite sure how secure they are? Well today I'll be showing you a series of codes and ciphers that will be sure to keep out even the sneakiest of eye's, Some of them are simple and others are more difficult to crack! But what ever one you choose, You're secrets are no longer on constant alert, So let's begin!

Step 1 The Caesar Shift Cipher

This one is a simple alphabet cipher, But it's tricky to break without the right key, Each letter is moved along by a number let's say 5 for right now, So A would become F, J becomes O, Z becomes E and so on. The number is the key to the cipher here, So you could agree on a number before hand and then send messages afterward, Then only the people with that number can read the messages.

So for example "Meet me at the park" would become "RJJY RJ FY YMJ UFWP" with the number 5 as the key.

For the first cipher it works well, but the problem is that there are only 25 possible combinations (26 would take you back to the letter you started with). As a result, if there was someone who really wanted to break the code they could simply pold there way thruogh all 25 combinations. Admittedly, they would have to know in the first place that it is the Caesar shift cipher, So this only get's a difficulty of 1 star, It's over 2,000 year's old, after all.

Comments

[tinkerist]

the problem with cyphers is that, even if you are using random symbols to represent letters, someone can hack at it using things like most common letters, common letter combinations, and two/three letter words to crack the code. some of this can be mitigated with intentional misspelling, slang, and pre-agreed code words. but some friends and i once created a whole new written language. this language was pronounced just like english but had three times as many characters. basically, english has 40 phonemes (the individual sounds we make in speech). so we made a "letter" for each phoneme. for example only one charater is used to make the CH sound, different characters for a long O and a short O, etc. we then added charcters for common prefixes and suffixes and even syntax words like 'the' and 'or' and 'and'. eventually we messed with the very structure of english by deciding that 'YOU' is the second person version of 'I' and 'HE' is the third person masculine of 'I'. eventually, using prefixes, suffixes, and modifiers, we had words for which there is no single word in english. surprisingly, this came out to a very intuitive code that we didn't even need a key for after a week or two of passing notes. we could just read it, but it would be very difficult for even a professional cryptologist to decode.

[imbignate]

Nice to see the younger Futhark is still alive and well :)