The classical crypto cracking workbench

We're going to make a fun little tool to help with cracking cryptograms and classical ciphers.

Simple substitution ciphers (the usual cryptogram)

• Letter frequency analysis
• n-gram frequency analysis
• interactive decryption key builder

Lessons

• histogram-matching
• cryptogram-cracking
• digraph-analysis
• more-arrays-and-loops

Polyalphabetic ciphers

This family of ciphers encrypts characters with more than one possible substitution. Sometimes it's because the cipher works on blocks of characters at a time (e.g. playfair-cipher), and sometimes it's just literally a new key for every letter (viginere cipher). These are harder to break by hand, but we'll develop some tools to help with the process.

Transposition ciphers

Transposition ciphers are different because they don't actually substitute new letters at all, they just shuffle the original letters around. This is going to take a completely different approach! We may or may not get to this before the end of the year.