Tutorial

The cipher puzzle should be fairly straightforward. Fill in a few phrases and then hit the "Make Puzzle" at the bottom of the page.

Try a few simple puzzles to see that you know the basic function.

Next, there are a number of options to generate puzzles to better match your needs. Along with each option is a link on the right to help explain what the option does.

Easy Puzzles

Pick a simple "caesar" cipher that just shifts each letter by a number. So a "caesar" puzzle with a shift of "2" will turn an "A" into a "C", a "B" into a "D", etc. Once the user is confident that they have the right count, it is straight forward to decode the phrases.

Keep the length of the key to "1". This means that there is a single mapping of one letter to its corrosponding result.

Hard Puzzles

At the other end, some people want puzzles as hard as possible.

• Use the "substitution" cipher, and scramble up all of the letters.
• Specify your character set. You can map upper and lower case letters to something completely different. You can add punctuation to the characters that get encrypted.
• Use code groups. Normally word boundaries and punctuation are kept as they are in the input phrases. Forcing things into groups of 4 or 5 output letters loses that information.
• Use longer key lengths. If you rotate through a 5 or 10 letter key seqence, you will make it more difficult to figure out what the substitutions are. The user will first have to figure out what the key length is.

Up

Next