cryptographers take note! The Caesar cipher, or the Caesar shift, is perhaps one of the more straightforward encryption techniques out there. In order to encrypt or solve a Caesar cipher, all you need is an
. Each letter is assigned to another letter elsewhere in the alphabet, but these letters keep the same sequence, so no matter how many letters down the line you shift, all the others shift the same amount. A word like CIPHER, can be JPWOLY or UAHZWJ or
depending on that shift value.
The Caesar cipher itself dates back, at least, to
Caesar himself, who used the technique to communicate secret codes to his armies and generals. Notably, whenever he sent an encrypted message, the letter A always equalled the letter D, and all of the other letters followed this shift of 3. Caesar managed to find great military success through the
Wars but his assassination, led by
and Cassius in 44AD, led to the fall of the Roman
and a great shift in leadership and political structure.
A
method of encryption would be the
cipher, which does perform the same sort of alphabet shift as the Caesar cipher, but which utilizes a key to do so. With this cipher, each letter in the proposed key indicates a shift. If your key is CIPHER, it would mean that the first letter of your word-to-decode would shift by 3 (since C is the third letter) and your second letter would shift by 9 (since I is the ninth letter) and so-forth. This means that the encoded word
would actually decode to CAESAR. And if the encoded word were longer than than the key, then you would loop back to the start of the key to continue decoding.
