Thoughts and Stories

So I can still remember the first time I watched the movie “The Prestige” and how I was fascinated that Christian Bale had a secret code that could only be unlocked by a secret phrase. As it turns out making a cryptogram was easier than I thought. Committing it to memory is something I still have yet to master. I’m going to teach you the easiest of the complicated cryptograms (since you want it to be complicated enough that people won’t be able to break it). Using this you can take a keyword and make a cypher that will be pretty difficult to crack.

Most cyphers are substitution based, but these fall to codebreakers because the amount a letter is used can be a factor in what it is substituted for. This cypher goes a bit further and shifts the substitution alphabet every letter and repeats after every three or four switches. Here’s the trick, you pick a code phrase (we’ll use four letters for our practice code) and each letter you begin the substitution alphabet with a letter of the code phrase. For example the code phrase test would use something 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 

and your substitution alphabet would look like this

T 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 

i’ll let you fill in the rest but your substitution alphabet for the next letter would begin with “E” and then “S” and so forth. Spaces are ignored for sake of simplicity. Also, instead of using the T substitution twice at the beginning and end, just use it once (as if the code phrase were TES). Try writing your own passages in code. Or try translating the phrase below.

BJ QHY LKEFLPSMIV MLAL CGN AENX XGG FYUA XAFI

Or for those of you who think you can crack my personal code. Try the three word phrase below.

MNN MAU LFGTEF

For those of you who think that this code isn’t secret enough you can always code a phrase and then run a completely new cypher with an entirely new code phrase. This will make the code almost unbreakable, but it takes a lot more time and is a lot more prone to mistake. So…to each his own, enjoy!