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Learn about ADFGVX, the German WWI field cipher that combined Polybius-square fractionation with columnar transposition. It was considered so strong that French cryptanalyst Georges Painvin needed weeks to break a message that helped stop a 1918 offensive.
Columnar transposition doesn't hide letters. It just rearranges them, so frequency analysis finds nothing wrong. Learn the attack that actually works: brute-forcing every column order for each candidate key length, scored by common English substrings.
Learn about the columnar transposition cipher, a classic cipher that scrambles the order of letters instead of replacing them. Learn why combining it with substitution led to some of the toughest hand ciphers ever used.
