In 1854, Sir Charles Wheatstone invented the cipher known as "Playfair," named for his friend Lyon Playfair, first Baron Playfair of St. Andrews, who popularized and promoted the cipher. Its ...

Hannah handed me a piece of paper with the following string of letters. “Each letter stands for another one,” said Hannah. “Ooh, a substitution cipher!” I thought. But I was stumped. “Is this just one ...

Learn how to implement a classic substitution cipher in C! This step-by-step tutorial walks you through encoding and decoding messages by replacing each letter with another according to a fixed key. A ...

You could do worse than to confuse the meanings of "code" and "cipher"—even cryptographers sometime use the terms as though they had the same meaning. There is, however, a definite distinction between ...

If this anthology of six short stories that ask “What if?” doesn’t stack up against similar volumes, like The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century, its well-written entries will still ...