Codes and Ciphers
Get to know some Codes. Ciphers. I told you about some web tools for these earlier. Here are twenty relatively common ciphers. There are many more:
There are also different ways of doing cipher-text encoding, and I won't teach you about them here, however some great series of geocaches in both Brisbane and South Australia will step you through that.
English language frequencies - for code searching
When faced with a lot of seemingly random symbols, more than 120, try frequency analysis. Find the symbol repeated the most often and change it to an “E”, repeat for the next few most common symbols using the lists below. See if part-words appear. Also look for common pairs of symbols or doubles of symbols.
- Letters in order of frequency: ETAO INSH RDLF CMUG YPWB VKJX QZ
- Letter pairs in order: TH HE AN RE ER IN ON AT ND ST ES EN OF TE ED OR TI HI AS TO
- Doubled letters: LL EE SS OO TT FF RR NN PP CC
Note: The 'top twelve' letters comprise about 80% of the total usage. The 'top eight" letters comprise about 65% of the total usage. So try determining the top 8 or 12 ‘symbols’ in the code, applying the letters as above and seeing if common words, or repeated ‘wrong looking letters’ show up.
Frequency count when spelling numbers out
One, two three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero
There are some differences to the standard ETAO INSH … the key is to use EINORT instead when you think you are looking at spelled out numbers. Repeated letter pairs may imply repeated numbers, however ‘ve’ is in five and seven and ‘ne’ is in one and nine.
Seek expected numbers such as two eight or one five one to see what else might show up on that basis. If you can see 'hundred' as in one hundred and fifty one, expect the word degrees to be included, otherwise just stating digits probably has not included ‘degrees’. Not always, but common.
LBJIN FCILH NVQOV KNJWQ CAPTL EKOYB QOUHY XAVUQ NLYBU LNNNE JWMFN PPZDL RPAGE PAAHH YPWCG VFLRO UKZTR FJOZA QVJHX GBRJL RGBDF JYVQV JLNNN EJWMF NPPBJ GATZG EALBW KNUAR ZVKCA EBGEZ LEVGE TXUCK JGLBJ NRBAU IOYCA E
