🗝️ Caesar & Vigenère Cipher

Caesar · ROT13 · Atbash · Vigenère · encode/decode · case kept

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Four ciphers that carry real history: Caesar (shift every letter by k — ROT13 is just k=13, its own inverse), Atbash (flip the alphabet, Hebrew-letterbook wisdom), and Vigenère (a different Caesar shift per letter from a keyword — the "le boundless" cipher that resisted casual breaking for three centuries). Everything runs on your device and the page says the quiet part out loud: these are not encryption. A cipher you can demo on a napkin is a cipher a computer breaks before the soup arrives.

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Why "encrypted with a Caesar cipher" is a joke in security circles

Twenty-five possible keys for Caesar is fewer than a four-digit PIN tries before lunch; a simple frequency count breaks it in seconds because English E still arrives first no matter how far you marched the alphabet. Vigenère survived until the 1850s precisely because its repeating key finally hid frequency — until Kasiski found the repeat distance. The lesson each of these teaches is Kerckhoffs's principle: the algorithm is never the secret, only the key is, and 25 or 26ⁿ key-space is not a defence. Use them to understand history and to amuse your friends; use real AES-GCM libraries for anything you would not post on a door.

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