The Alphabet Cipher

The Alphabet Cipher

Lewis Carroll published The Alphabet-Cipher in 1868, possibly in a children's magazine. It describes what is known as a Vigenère cipher, a well-known scheme in cryptography. While Carroll calls this cipher "unbreakable", Kasiski had published a volume describing how to break such ciphers from five years earlier, and Charles Babbage had secretly found ways to break polyalphabetic ciphers during the Crimean War.

The piece begins with a tabula recta.

Read more about The Alphabet Cipher:  The Alphabet-Cipher, Lewis Carroll, 1868

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