Details

The Vigenère cipher is a generalization of the Caesar cipher and other shift ciphers. The Caesar cipher replaces each letter in a message with the letter three letters later in the alphabet (including wrapping around to replace x with a, etc.), and thus is effectively a Vigenère cipher with keyword "d." However, the Vigenère cipher is much more difficult to crack, since it is not a simple substitution cipher—two occurrences of the same letter in a message are typically encrypted with different letters. Conversely, two occurrences of the same letter in an encrypted message typically represent two different letters in the original message. In general, the longer the keyword, the more difficult it is to crack the code.

This Demonstration includes nine messages and seven keywords to illustrate Vigenère encryption. Two single-letter keywords are included to illustrate Caesar (shift) ciphers.

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