Shift ciphers

CIPHER MACHINES AND CRYPTOLOGY Hand Ciphers About Hand Ciphers Hand ciphers, also known as pencil-and-paper ciphers or field ciphers by the military, are encryption methods that are performed with nothing more than pencil and paper. Many of these classical ciphers were developed in two-thousand years of cryptography. With each new cipher that was developed, codebreakers found new attacks to break them, and codemakers improved their ciphers and devised new methods to elevate the security of their ciphers. Hand ciphers have always been a compromise between security and practicality. Very secure ciphers were often very elaborate, unpractical and prone to errors. This was a disadvantage in tactical circumstances. On the other hand, practical and less complex ciphers were often weak. Nonetheless, these insecure ciphers proved to be interesting in some tactical circumstances where time to break them would exceed the tactical life span of the message. On this page you will find some methods and techniques that are the result of many years of evolution in cryptography. I won't go through the simple types like Caesar Shift, ROT-13 or all kinds of Vigenère variations that are easy to break with nothing more than pencil and paper but will focus on the more complex ciphers that earned their stripes in the 20th century. Some of the explained techniques can be useful to develop your own hand cipher. One-time Pad The one-time pad encryption is a special kind of cipher that has its own page on this website. Please visit the one-time pad

There are numerous mechanisms, electronic devices and other fancy equipment to make your game fun and challenging. But, sometimes, all it takes is just pen (or printer) and paper. Learn more about codes and ciphers and how to use them in your escape room.You may not be aware of it, but we use codes ciphers every day. Street signs, food allergen symbols in restaurant menus, computer icons. Most probably you have also used ciphers to make a hard to break internet password, or to send a secret message to your friend during high school times.Codes and ciphers are both used to deliver some sort of message. This might be achieved in many different ways and we are going to show you some that you might be cool to use in your escape room.Caesar and other letter-based ciphersThe first type of ciphers uses only letters to encode the message. It could something from changing teh odrer of the lertts (not a challenge, not even for new players!) to some more fancy tricks.For example, you can use the first letters of each word of the sentence to form a phrase: Consider It a Poorly Hidden Example of a Riddle. A similar kind of puzzles are acrostics. They are poems in which the message is encoded in the first letters of each of line or paragraph. To read the hidden meaning, one has to read the poem both vertically and horizontally.In the past, the disk ciphers were used to decode the messages. Here you can see a disk used to crack substitution ciphers, like Caesar’s.What about Caesar? He is the author of one of the popular ciphers, named “Caesar’s cipher”. It shifts every letter by a fixed number of letters down the alphabet. For example, if the shift is “2”, the C becomes E, and E becomes G. Try writing down a cryptic message and hide the shift number somewhere in the room. It’s fairly simple once you get a grasp of it but can still provide quite a challenge. Iqqf nwem!*From Morse to emojis – symbol-based ciphersThe second form of ciphers uses graphic symbols, and thus makes a room for more creativity. You can use one of the already established sets of symbols, or make one of your own. Looking for something classic? The Morse code uses only dots and dashes and it’s generally well-known to many – but that does not

SSL/TLS Cipher suites determine the parameters of an HTTPS connection. Andthey’ve just undergone a facelift.If you interact with SSL/TLS and HTTPS encryption longenough, you’re eventually going to come across the term “cipher suite.” Andwhile that sounds like a fancy nickname for Alan Turing’s hotel room, ciphersuites play a critical role in every HTTPS connection you make on the internet.So, what are encryption ciphers? And what are cipher suites?Ciphers are algorithms, more specifically they’re a set ofsteps for performing a cryptographic function – it can be encryption, decryption,hashing or digital signatures. Nowadays ciphers are dependent upon the advancedprocessing capabilities of computers. That hasn’t always been the case though.One of the first, well-known historical ciphers belonged to Caesar – the veryfirst emperor of Rome and purveyor of fancy appetizer salads – who used it tocommunicate with his generals during military operations.Over the years, ciphers have become more complex, but thelogic behind them has stayed the same. Whether it was Caesar crossing theRubicon, the infamous Enigma cipher of World War II or some of the algorithmsof today—the idea has always been to encode or encipher a message in such a waythat only the intended party can read it. Today we’re going to discuss SSL/TLS Cipher Suites – groupsof ciphers that help secure an HTTPS connection – then go over their variousparts and finish by looking at what’s changed between TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3.Let’s hash it out.Cipher Suites – Some BackgroundAs we just covered, a cipher is really just an algorithm, ora set of steps that are used to perform a specific mathematical function – be thatencryption, hashing or digital signatures. Ciphers have always had a basis inmath, even Caesar’s primitive shift cipher required counting forward a designatednumber of spaces in the alphabet to encrypt something. I’m going to use Caesar’s cipher to explain some basicconcepts that will be useful later when we get into modern cipher suites. Thepiece of data or information – it’s all digital now, though historically there’stypically been some kind of ink and paper/parchment involved. Anyway, that originalunencrypted piece of data would be referred to as the plaintext, as it’s easilyreadable in its raw form. After the encryption process has been performed, itbecomes a piece of ciphertext and should ideally be unreadable to anyonewithout the private key.Keys vs. AlgorithmsEncryption is performed by keys, but it’s important to squarehow keys and algorithms/ciphers fit together. The algorithm or cipher used is