I ♥ Ciphers

I ♥ Ciphers

I love cracking ciphers! I love cracking ciphers! I love cracking ciphers! In fact, I think it is one of the main reasons that I do Cybersecurity. In fact, my favourite thing I ever did at school was solving a Caeser cipher. I can vividly remember the joy of cracking it. Over the years we have thus presenting ciphers to schools, and, generally, they have loved them.

Overall,there’s something of a challenge to take a secret message and to crack it. It’s a kinda human thing. And, it is a challenge to create ciphers which keep things secret for Bob and Alice, and for Eve to crack it.

And so I’ve been on the hunt for as many ciphers as I can find, and fit them into an on-line cipher challenge system. I wanted to make it ever changing, so that users do not learn the answers, and to run it in a class, where every user gets a different challenge:

I personally thing that every single pupil at school should be given ciphers to crack. So, I’ve created a challenge generator with answers (for teachers), here:

My next steps are to create a PDF output, so that teachers and tutors can download lessons (either with or without answers). The jobs of the future are all about solving complex problem, so go and feed your brain.