Tool
Caesar Cipher
Shift every letter along the alphabet. Pick a shift, or let the bench try all 25 and show you which one reads as English.
How the Caesar cipher works
Each letter moves a fixed number of places along the alphabet. With a shift of three, A becomes D and X wraps round to A. ROT13 is the same idea with a shift of thirteen, which has the neat property that doing it twice gets you back where you started.
How to crack it
There are only 25 possible shifts, so you can try every one. The brute-force panel does exactly that. Look for the line that reads as ordinary words. If a short message has been encoded, a single common word such as the or and is often enough to spot the right shift.
Caesar ciphers are everywhere in puzzle covers and escape rooms, which is why the bench is built into this site.
Goes with
Written in the Open
Real codes, ciphers and hidden messages in old texts, art, music and buildings: the certain ones, the disputed ones, the hoaxes, and how to tell them apart.
About the book