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Username:
Nickname(s):
Favorite code/cipher:
Reason for joining:

Username: JustMe4031
Nickname(s): JustMe, K9
Favourite code/cipher: The Vigenere Cipher
Reason for joining creating: I love code-breaking and I thought it would be neat to have a place where others like me could come together to chat about it.

JustMe4031 (JustMe, K-9)
Ufimtsev (Fim, Yarly)

"Cleverness isn't always true nor is the truth always clever." -Criss Jami.

"Intelligence is three things, first it is diverse, second it is dynamic and third it is distinct." Sir Ken Robinson"

After copying your quote onto a piece of paper, I plugged in letters/words to solve hwm'b, and I found that b = t made the most sense. When trying a few more combinations, I figured the words can't and won't didn't seem to fit with the other places the letters would be used, so I noted down isn't as a possibility and moved on to solving bsn, which, following the b = t rule, would likely make the. ^^ Then I filled in the rest of the t's, h's and e's, and after finding bpvbs to come out as t__th, I tried truth. From there, it all kind of clicked, haha.

Did you notice where my re-arranged alphabet came from? It isn't just random... You should be able to discover what all the other letters are that didn't get used in the quote..

For short ones like this, I would tend to do the same sort of thing as you did. I would have picked the w as an s pretty quick, as a double letter at the end of a word is most commonly s. This would have given me h as either a or i, and looking at hwm'b, i would be the most likely, making isn't, which would give me 'the' and so on.
For a long message, my first step would be to sort out any one letter words, and two letters if possible, and then find the frequency of all the letters used. Of the most common letters, it is likely that one of those is an 'e', and another a 't', as they are the most commonly used letters. I would also sort out any double letters, and any words with apostrophes in them. Once that is done, the rest is usually pretty easy.
If I knew the message was a letter, my first step would be to look at the greeting and the ending, as a four letter word at the start would most likely be 'dear' which would give me some good letters to start off with. If the four letter word is followed directly by a 2 or 3 letter word, that is most likely 'mr' or 'mrs', again giving me some good letters. If there is a 9 letter word in the ending it is probably 'sincerely', and a 6 letter word might be 'thanks'. This usually gives enough letters to solve the rest.

Try writing out the alphabet across the page, and writing the letters you know underneath.

You might want to ask Herbert M Zim for some advice...

The Caesar cipher is one of the simplest types of cipher. It is also known as a shift cipher, where each letter of the alphabet is replaced by the letter a fixed number of positions down the alphabet. For example, a Caesar cipher with a shift of 5 would replace A with F, B with G, C with H and so on.

Well, not surprisingly, it was named after Julius Caesar, as he was the first one known to use this particular method. He would write his important messages with a shift of 3, so that if they were intercepted by the enemy, they would not discover his secrets. Although these days it would be relatively easy to solve, back then it was probably rather effective. There was no known decryption technique for simple substitution ciphers such as these until the 9th century. Also, most of Caesars enemies would have been illiterate anyway, and others would have assumed it was a foreign language.
Later on, in 1915, the Russians are recorded to have been using a Caesar cipher, as it was quick and easy to learn and use. The downside to this is that the messages were also easy for their enemies to decrypt.
In the 1930's, the Caesar cipher was commonly used in childrens' toys such as 'secret decoder rings', and in fact, they are still very popular today.
More recently, in 2006, part of the capture of mafia boss Bernado Provenzano was due to the breaking of the code he used which was based on the Caesar cipher. The difference being he used numbers instead, so A=4, B=5 and so on.

1. First write out the alphabet across a scrap piece of paper like this:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
2. Next, write the letter A underneath on of the other letters, like this:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
...................A.....................................................
3. Then continue writing the alphabet after the A. When you get to the end, continue at the other end, like this:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T

You now have your cipher. Too encrypt your message, simply replace each letter in it, with the letter directly below the one in the cipher. For example, using the cipher above, the message "Meeting at dawn by the old oak tree" would be encrypted as "Gyyncha un xuqh vs nby ifx iue nlyy"

To decrypt, simply do the same in reverse.

This is a great cipher for beginners to crack, because it is one of the easiest. To solve a Caesar cipher when you don't know how far the alphabet has been shifted, give this a try:
Find the most commonly used letters in the message. If using the example above again, we can see that the most common letter is 'y', followed by 'n'. The most commonly used letter is 'e', so write out the alphabet as before, and write another one underneath, starting with 'y' below e.
Try decoding the first few words using this cipher, does it make sense? If not, try again with the next most common letter under the e and so on until you find the one that makes sense.
Not very message will have 'e' as it's most common letter, but it will almost always be in the top 5.
Here's a handy tip: If you find yourself not wanting to write the alphabet every time, you could make yourself a Caesar Cipher Wheel. Then all you have to do is line up the letters and away you go!
Here's one you can do on your own, but please post the answer using spoilers so you don't spoil it for others ;)
Zhoo grqh, brx zrunhg lw rxw! Jlyh brxuvhoi d sdw rq wkh edfn!

"Well done, you worked it out! Give yourself a pat on the back!"

Simply put, seeing the double O's in "zhoo" made me think of L. Assuming it to be the word well, it wasn't much of a reach to assume the first phrase could be well done. Thus I scribbled out a ROT3 shift on a spare piece of parchment and found my way to the answer.

This is a story.
Annnd the secret-ness starts immediately below this sentence.

Perhaps I should think of a better way to encode my messages.
Really, now, it's getting kind of ridiculous how fast people are figuring them out.
Are they really that simple to decode...? ;w;
Yeah, I guess they could be...I just picked the easiest one to test.
For whatever reason, the ones that you can learn the fastest are sometimes the weakest ones.
Or maybe the people decoding my messages just have super intelligence. Ho....
Remember that time I used that really hard cipher? I do! It took me forever to master it...and then?
Nobody solved it! I think they even consulted the internet, to no results.
Yep, that was a great cipher! The time I spent studying it really paid off. ^__^
Choosing to learn tougher ciphers and codes might be hard, but in the end, it's better and more secure.

Annnd, end!
How did you like it? True story, by the way. There's a secret message somewhere in there, you know. And special bonus points if you find the hidden word as well! :P
Make sure to put your answer(s) in spoilers in case somebody else wants to have a go at it.

Is it 'pray'? Going down the side? If I'm wrong, my brain has definitely been turned to mush.

Pray is absolutely correct. Just keep going in that direction. *coughcough* Pray is part of the secret phrase, and once you solve that, the key to solving the bonus word should be pretty clear. Or maybe not, I haven't people-tested (lol) one of these in a while so it might be completely obscure. xD

While the Caeser cipher is one of the easiest ciphers to break, the Vigenere is one of the toughest. It's a polyalphabetic cipher, meaning it uses many alphabets to encipher the message. It also uses a key-word.

This cipher was actually first described by Giovan Battista Bellaso in his book in 1553, but later in the 17th century it was misattributed to Blaise de Vigenere and became known as the Vigenere cipher. For 3 centuries it resisted all attempts to break it, and so became known as "le chiffre indechiffrable" (French for 'the indecipherable cipher'). In the 19th century, Kasiski was the first one to entirely break the cipher and have his work published, although previous to this, Charles Babbage is known to have broken the cipher but not had it published.
Although very difficult to break, it was easy enough to use as a field cipher during war if cipher discs were used. During the American Civil War, a Vigenere cipher was used by the Confederates. Unfortunately, it was often cracked by the Union as the Confederates relied on three common key-phrases "Manchester Bluff", "Complete Victory" and, during the later part of the war, "Come Retribution".
In 1918 Gilbert Vernam tried to repair the broken cipher by creating the Vernam-Vigenere cipher. Unfortunately, no matter what he did, it was still vulnerable to cryptoanalysis. His work did, however, largely contribute to the "one-time pad", a provenly unbreakable cipher.

First off, you need one of these, a Vigenere table:

Next, you need to choose a key word or short phrase. For this example, I'll use the phrase "stormin norman". Now decide on the message and write it out just like you did for the Caeser cipher, leaving out the spaces, like this:



Then write your word or phrase underneath, matching letter for letter, and repeat it to the end of the line. It will most likely finish mid-word. That's ok, just leave it like that.



Next, look at the first letter of the start of your message (w), then the letter directly below it(s). Find the first letter (w) on the first row of the table, then the next letter (s) on the first column. Then go across/down until you find the letter that lines up with both of them, (in this case 'o') This is the first letter of your cipher. Repeat this step with the remaining letters.



And there you have it, the bottom line is your cipher. To decode it, simply do the same in reverse.

Top Tip! When enciphering/deciphering one of these, it helps to use a couple of pieces of paper or two rulers to see where the rows and columns match up.

I must now confess that I have never managed to crack a vigenere cipher. However, there are a few methods, and Kasiski's method takes advantage of the vigenere's one weakness - the repetition of the key-word. (I have copied the following from wikipedia and edited it slightly.) For example, consider the following encryption using the keyword ABCD:
Message: CRYPTOISSHORTFORCRYPTOGRAPHY
Key: ABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCD
Cipher: CSASTPKVSIQUTGQUCSASTPIUAQJB
There is an easily seen repetition in the cipher, and the Kasiski test will be effective. Here the distance between the repetitions of CSASTP is 16. Assuming that the repeated segments represent the same message segments, this implies that the key is 16, 8, 4, 2, or 1 characters long. (All factors of the distance are possible key lengths – a key of length one is just a simple caesar cipher, where cryptanalysis is much easier.) Since key lengths 2 and 1 are unrealistically short, one only needs to try lengths 16, 8, or 4. Longer messages make the test more accurate because they usually contain more repeated cipher segments. The following cipher has two segments that are repeated:
Ciphertext: VHVSSPQUCEMRVBVBBBVHVSURQGIBDUGRNICJQUCERVUAXSSR
The distance between the repetitions of VHVS is 18. Assuming that the repeated segments represent the same message segments, this implies that the key is 18, 9, 6, 3, 2, or 1 characters long. The distance between the repetitions of QUCE is 30 characters. This means that the key length could be 30, 15, 10, 6, 5, 3, 2, or 1 characters long. By taking the intersection of these sets one could safely conclude that the most likely key length is 6, since 3, 2, and 1 are unrealistically short.

My top tip for cracking this cipher is simple: make sure you have plenty of time and patience. And be aware that there will be a lot of trial and error. Good luck!

I will edit this at a later date and put in a cipher for you to solve, but I have been typing for quite a while now and I need a break ;)

Probably the most well known code in the world, morse is a code where each character is represented by a series of dots(.) and dashes(-). For example, a would be shown as .-
However, this is a very versatile code, and the dots and dashes can be replaced by things like long and short beeps or flashes of light.

This code was originally invented in 1836, when the American artist Samuel F. B. Morse, the American physicist Joseph Henry, and Alfred Vail developed an electrical telegraph system. This system sent pulses of electric current along wires which controlled an electromagnet that was located at the receiving end of the telegraph system. A code was needed to transmit natural language using only these pulses, and the silence between them. Morse therefore developed the forerunner to modern International Morse code.

In the 1860's, Morse Code was used extensively in early radio communication, before it was possible to transmit voice. By the 1920's morse code was regularly used in aviation, and by the 1930s, both civilian and military pilots were required to be able to use Morse code, both for use with early communications systems and identification of navigational beacons which transmitted continuous two- or three-letter identifiers in Morse code.

Radio telegraphy using Morse Code was vital during World War 2, especially in sending messages between war ships and naval bases. Long-range ship-to-ship communications was by radio telegraphy, using encrypted messages, because the voice radio systems on ships then were quite limited in both their range, and their security. Radio telegraphy was also extensively used by warplanes, especially by long-range patrol planes that were sent out by these navies to scout for enemy warships, cargo ships, and troop ships.

SOS
The morse code distress signal sos (...---...) was first developed in 1905 by the German government, then became the official worldwide standard in 1908. This remained the maritime distress signal right up until 1999 when it was replaced by the Global Maritime Distress Safety System.
Although SOS became associated with phrases such as 'save our ship' and 'send out succour', the letters in SOS don't actually stand for anything. The dots and dashes are sent out with no letter-spacing in between, but rather as a continuous sequence. This is known as a "procedural signal" or "prosign", where the dots and dashes don't represent text per se, but have a special meaning in transmission. Another example of a morse code prosign is .-.-. which means "end of message". See more prosigns here

As this is a code, rather than a cipher, to use morse it is a simple matter of replacing each letter in your message with the relevant series of dots and dashes. Here they are:


Then all you have to do is decide how to send it.
As mentioned above, there are a variety of ways you could send morse code. Another example is of miners who used short and long tugs on a rope to communicate with the others above them.

So, for all my loyal followers, here is a little competition for you. Think of an imaginative way you could send a message in morse code. PM me your answer and the person who thinks of most creative way will win a totodile! You can enter as many ideas as you want, but please send them in the same PM. Deadline is 12pm 30th April (pokeheros time). Have fun!