Single-letter words in English will be “I” or “a,” so you should try to plug one in, looking for patterns, and–essentially–playing hangman. If you’ve got “a - -” solved, you know it would most regularly be “are” or “and. " Guess and check. If it doesn’t work, go back and try the other options. Be patient and go slowly. Don’t worry as much about “cracking” the code as learning to read it. Looking for patterns and recognizing the rules in which English (or whatever language is being coded) is written will get you solving the code with some time and effort.
Watch for double symbols and short words and start solving those first. It’s easier to try to make an educated guess at “an” or “in” or “at” than “highway. "
Number-substitutions and keyboard codes are especially common among basic everyday secret messages. Keep an eye out for those in particular and apply as you see fit.
Even if the code contains numbers, the Cyrillic alphabet, nonsense symbols, or hieroglyphics, as long as the type of symbol used is consistent, you’re probably working with a substitution cipher, which means you need to learn the alphabet used and the rule applied to decipher the code.
The most basic form of this code involved a row 1-5 and a column 1-5, and then filled the matrix in with each letter from left to right and down the grid (combining I and J into one space). Each letter in the code was represented by two numbers, the column on the left supplying the first digit, and the row on top supplying the second. To code the word “wikihow” using this method, you would get: 52242524233452 A simpler version of this often used by children involves writing in numbers that correspond directly to the letter’s position in the alphabet. A = 1, B=2, etc. [2] X Research source
This is also the basic principle behind a common children’s code called “ROT1” (meaning, “rotate one. " In this code, all the letters are just shifted forward one position, making A represented by B, B represented by C, etc. Coding “wikihow” using a basic Cesar shift of three to the left would look like: zlnlkrz
By shifting the columns up one position, you could code the word “wikihow” like this: “28i8y92”
Trimethius’s tableau is a 26 x 26 grid[5] X Research source of every permutation of Cesar’s shifted alphabets, in alphabetical order, or sometimes presented as a rotating cylinder, or “tabula recta. " There are various methods of using the grid as a code, including using the first row to code the first letter in the message, the second for the second, and so on. [6] X Research source Coders will also use a code word to refer to specific columns for each letter of the enciphered message. In other words, if the code word was “wikihow” using this method, you would consult the “W” row and the column of the first letter in the enciphered code to determine the first letter of the message. These are tough to crack without knowing the code word.
Analyzing criminal codes and ciphers can be a good way of picking up some tricks of the trade. Bookmakers, drug kingpins, and the Zodiac killer have all developed incredibly complex codes worth looking into. [7] X Research source
Kryptos, a public statue outside the CIA headquarters, is perhaps the most famous unsolved code in the world. It was originally created as a test for agents, involving four separate panels with four distinct codes. It took ten years for the first analysts to crack three of the codes, but the final code remains unsolved. [9] X Research source
