Hannah handed me a piece of paper with the following string of letters. “Each letter stands for another one,” said Hannah. “Ooh, a substitution cipher!” I thought. But I was stumped. “Is this just one ...

This morning, the NSA Careers Twitter account posted what looked like a series of nonsense letters: tpfccdlfdtte pcaccplircdt dklpcfrp?qeiq lhpqlipqeodf gpwafopwprti izxndkiqpkii krirrifcapnc ...

You can make a message secret in countless different ways. One common way is to use a substitution cipher, in which one letter is substituted for another. Another is to employ a transposition cipher, ...

In 1854, Sir Charles Wheatstone invented the cipher known as "Playfair," named for his friend Lyon Playfair, first Baron Playfair of St. Andrews, who popularized and promoted the cipher. Its ...