Cipher 101 Tutorials

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Aristocrats Cipher Tutorial

Intermediate 30 minutes

What is an Aristocrat Cipher?

An Aristocrat cipher is a type of substitution cipher where each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a different letter of the alphabet. The key is the substitution alphabet itself. Unlike keyword ciphers, there is no simple keyword to define the substitution. Each letter maps to another, but the mapping is jumbled.

Solving Aristocrats: Frequency Analysis

The most powerful tool for solving Aristocrat ciphers is frequency analysis. In any given language, certain letters appear more frequently than others. In English, the most common letters are:

E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D, L, U

  1. Count the frequency of each letter in the ciphertext.
  2. The most frequent letter in the ciphertext is likely to be 'E'. The next most frequent is likely 'T', and so on.
  3. Look for patterns: single-letter words are almost always 'A' or 'I'. The most common three-letter word is 'THE'.

Practice Time!

Try to decode the following message:

"PCQ VMU"