CIPHER/RENAISSANCE CIPHERS
Renaissance ciphers
6The century that invented the changing substitution, the mixed alphabet and the reciprocal tableau.
Alberti Disk
Leon Battista Alberti built a brass disk in the 1460s and, with it, crossed the line that separates classical from modern…
TEAR HTKU WTOU…
Renaissance · Substitution · FieldBaconian Cipher
Francis Bacon's 1605 biliteral cipher is the first recorded binary encoding of an alphabet, three centuries before anyone had a…
BAABA AABBB AABAA ABABA ABBAB ABBAB ABABB BAAA…
Renaissance · Transposition · FieldCardan Grille
Girolamo Cardano's grille is a sheet of stiff paper with holes cut in it. Lay it over a blank page, write the message through the…
· S · · E · · C · · R · · · · · · · E · · · T …
Renaissance · Transposition · FieldColumnar Transposition
Columnar transposition is the workhorse of classical field ciphers: simple enough to do with a pencil, strong enough to be worth…
OEP LET OVO MRS NSX…
Renaissance · Polyalphabetic · FieldPorta Cipher
Giovanni Battista della Porta published this tableau in 1563 and solved a problem that had annoyed cryptographers for a century…
AAAANZSVJFWOPY…
Renaissance · Polyalphabetic · FieldVigenere Tableau
The Vigenere cipher was called *le chiffre indéchiffrable* — the indecipherable cipher — for roughly three hundred years, and the…
UYEDGPDRWEFDBWJT…