Rail Fence Cipher
The Rail Fence cipher is a form of transposition cipher that gets its name from the way in which it is encoded. In the rail fence cipher, the plaintext is written downwards on successive "rails" of an imaginary fence, then moving up when we get to the bottom. The message is then read off in rows. For example, using three "rails" and a message of 'WE ARE DISCOVERED. FLEE AT ONCE', the cipherer writes out:
W . . . E . . . C . . . R . . . L . . . T . . . E . E . R . D . S . O . E . E . F . E . A . O . C . . . A . . . I . . . V . . . D . . . E . . . N . .Then reads off:
WECRL TEERD SOEEF EAOCA IVDEN(The cipherer has broken this ciphertext up into blocks of five to help avoid errors.)
Read more about this topic: Transposition Cipher
Famous quotes containing the words rail, fence and/or cipher:
“Old man, it’s four flights up and for what?
Your room is hardly any bigger than your bed.
Puffing as you climb, you are a brown woodcut
stooped over the thin rail and the wornout tread.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Poor Henry, he’s spending eternity wandering round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to peep over and they’re having tea just too far away for him to hear what the countess is saying.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1966)
“It is not an arbitrary “decree of God,” but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)