Decrypting Text

The Colossus at Bletchley

Transposition cipher decryption - 1

Transposition (or anagram) ciphers are where the letters are jumbled up together. Instead of replacing characters with other characters, this cipher just changes the order of the characters. This means that the giveaway for a transposition cipher is that frequency analysis shows that the constituent letters are what would be expected in a standard text (eg. e is the most common English letter). What typically happens is that the text to be encrypted is arranged in a number of columns. These columns are then reordered resulting in encrypted text eg. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) -> (4, 5, 3, 2, 1).

To decrypt you need to workout the number of columns - this is usually based on a common factor of the total number of characters in the text - and then rearrange the columns. Easier said than done...

Here is some text that has been encrypted with a transposition cipher. Some of it is in German just to make it more difficult to decrypt. Of course you can paste any ciphertext that you want to decipher over this.

Enter your ciphertext below: