Oranchak, a 46-year-old software developer in Virginia, said the 340 is what’s known as a transposition cipher. Most ciphers used today by computers rely on mathematics to scramble messages.

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Until now, a 250-year-old encoded text titled the Copiale Cipher baffled cryptographers and historians with bizarre symbols and seemingly random letters. Computer scientist Kevin Knight and two ...

Some ciphers have simple keys, others, complex ones. The key for a cipher used by Augustus Caesar, some 2,000 years ago, was simple enough: The receiver just had to shift the alphabet one position.

So, for example, if you read an entire paragraph and notice that the letter D appears more often than any other, odds are that it used a Caesar cipher with a shift of 1 (making E a D in the code).

Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code Unlocking This Cipher Wasn't Self-Evident; Algorithms and Educated Guesses By Rachel Emma Silverman July 2, 2009 12:01 am ET Share ...