Update: July 2023, I've also uploaded a sheet for teachers and parents to give to their kids of sample codes to break. They are simply but get progressively harder, download it here: Caeser-Cipher-Code-Breaking-Cryptography-Examples.pdf UPDATED: 24th July …
Tonight the Beehives were in charge of the "All Girls Night". What a fun night! It was a Secret Service Mission. * BEFORE THE ACTIVITY The Sunday before the activity, one of the Beehives stood up during opening exercises to make an announcement about the activity. She was sportin' a black hat and dark sunglasses. As she explained the upcoming activity she remained in total under cover spy character. So cute! * ON THE NIGHT OF THE ACTIVITY We were divided into three teams. Each team was given a cipher wheel (which they Beehives made themselves). Next, each team was then given a manilla evelope with the words TOP SECRET stamped on the front. Each envelope held a clue, which led us to our first location and told us what service we were to give. When the service was completed, we were given our next clue. Each team went to three different locations. These were a few of the service activities they set up for the night: squeezing lemons, dusting blinds, pulling weeds, vaccuming, * MAKE YOUR OWN CIPHER WHEEL 1.Print the two wheels you find below on card stock. 2.Cut out both wheels. Make sure you don't cut off the black triangle on the smaller one. 3.With a sharp point, make a small hole in the middle of both wheels. 4.Join the two wheels together (small one on top of the big one) with a split pin or cotter pin.
Create your own cipher wheel. The 26 letter alphabet is on the outside ring. The second wheel contains two rows - one for your symbols and one for your cipher clue. The third wheel will help isolate the cypher code.
Recently, my children have been studying the American Revolution. Last fall, I wrote them a chapter book about teenage Revolutionary War heroine Sybil Luddington, and inspired by this book, they've been a little obsessed with learning about Revolutionary War spies. (Incidentally, the Sybil Luddington book will be available to everyone in the coming months; it's a sequel to my free children's chapter book Day with the Dinosaurs - which you can snag here.) As part of our studies, we've been having lots of fun with invisible ink (made from a variety of household materials) and ciphers. We learned that Thomas Jefferson invented something called the Jefferson Disc Cipher (sometimes called a wheel cipher or Bazeries cylinder; you can see an image of it to the left). It worked so well, the American government continued to use it right on up to WWII! You can read more about the Jefferson Disc Cipher at Wikipedia and CipherMachines.com. Online, I found a number of sites that suggested ways to make a disc cipher; one recommended collecting mayonnaise lids for the discs - but it would take us a long time to go through enough mayo to get the required number of lids. Another suggested ribbon spools, but I didn't have any on hand. And others suggested just using paper - but the directions were either non-existent or confusing. In the end, I made our own paper template, which you can download for free by clicking the link below. Free Jefferson Disc Cipher Printable (.PDF) My kids absolutely love this simple cipher! They've spent hours creating and deciphering messages with each other. Maybe they need a nice wooden one that will last; they sell them at Monticello, and at Amazon. We'll see. How to Make a Simple Jefferson Wheel Cipher You will need: Printed "free Jefferson Disc Cipher Printable" (see above link) An empty toilet paper tube (or empty paper towel tube) Scissors Tape 1. Cut out the columns of letters. There will be 7 strips. (If using a paper towel tube, you will need to print out more than one sheet of letters.) 2. Take one of the strips of paper and wrap it around the outside of the tube. Tape the two ends of the paper together. The strip should spin around the tube; do not tape the strip to the tube. Continue with the remaining strips of paper. 3. To use the disc cipher, first decide what you want to say. Then find where the first letter of the first word is on the first strip of paper. On a piece of blank paper, write down the letter that's beneath it on the disc cipher. Now find the second letter of the word on the second strip of paper. Write down the letter beneath it...and so on, until your message is complete. Use an underscore ( _ ) between words. Now someone with the exact same cipher can decode your message! Example of How to Use the Disc Cipher: Let's say I want to send the following message: "Help me!" First, I'd find the letter H on the first strip of paper. Since the letter under that is O, I'd write the letter O on a blank piece of paper. Next, I'd find the letter E on the second strip of paper. Since the letter under it is L, I'd write the letter L on the paper. I'd continue, moving to the next strip of paper each time I needed a new letter, until I no longer had letter strips on the right hand side of the tube. Then I'd move back to the first (left hand side) letter strip...until I'd written out my entire message. When I was done, my message would read: OLSW _ TL Now I'd hand the cipher wheel over to my fellow spy, along with my coded message. To decipher the message, my friend would find the letter O on the first paper strip. The letter just above it is H, so he'd write H down on a piece of paper. Now he'd look at the second strip of paper and find the letter L. The letter just below it is E, so he'd write that down...and so on until the message is deciphered.
Learn how to make a simple cardboard Cipher Wheel. Encrypt and Decrypt secret messages, and learn Numbers, Letters, and Cryptography.
Update: July 2023, I've also uploaded a sheet for teachers and parents to give to their kids of sample codes to break. They are simply but get progressively harder, download it here: Caeser-Cipher-Code-Breaking-Cryptography-Examples.pdf UPDATED: 24th July …
Printable Secret Decoder Wheel - Attention all secret agents! Your secret decoder wheel has arrived and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to send and receive secret messages to your friends without anyone being the wiser. No one will be able to decode your messages unless they have the secret key. This is a super
M-125 fialka-electromechanical wheel-based cipher machine ussr rotor-based cipher machine m-125, codename fialka (russian: ??????), was an electromechanical wheel-based cipher machine, developed in the ussr shortly after wwii. It was first introduced in 1956 and soon became one of the favorite machines of the warsaw pact and some allied nations, such as cuba. The machine is similar to the american sigaba, the kl-7 and, to a lesser extend, the enigma. For this reason the machine is sometimes referred to as the russian enigma. The original m-125 was succeeded by the m-125-3m in the mid-1960s and remained in use until the early 1990s. The machine has 10 cipher rotors, each with 30 contacts at either side. Adjacent rotors move in opposite directions. In addition, the machine has a card reader in which a new punched key card was installed on a daily basis. In addition, it has a printer, a tape reader and a tape puncher. Each country of the warsaw pact had its own customized fialka version, adapted for the local language. This means that each country had its own keyboard and print head. Furthermore, the wiring of the coding wheels is different for each country. The rest of the machine is identical. Fialka m-125-3 with open lid most machines can be used for messages in latin and cyrillic (russian) writing. Although the latin alphabet was different for each country, the cyrillic alphabet had no punctuation marks and was identical on all machines, making them interoperable when a mutual set of wheels was used. A standard – russian-only – version also existed. It was used by local ussr services like the kgb. The fall of the berlin wall in 1989, marked the decline and led to the collapse of the soviet union. With the retreat of the russians from the countries behind the iron curtain, the remaining fialka machines were taken back and have subsequently been destroyed. Fortunately, some machines have miraculously escaped demolition, which enables us to present some details here. Fialka is a russian word that means violet ; a rather nice small flower. Around 1956, the russian army introduced a brand new cipher machine, which was given the codename fialka. Two basic versions of the machine are known to exist: m-125 and m-125-3m, with country-specific variants of each model. In principle, the machine is called m-125, whereas fialka is the name of the cipher procedure. However, as most people call the machine fialka, we have used that name throughout this website as well. Here are two examples. The one on the left is a basic m-125. The older m-125 and the later m-125-3 side by side (polish versions shown here) the design of the fialka is clearly based on the well-known enigma machine, that was used by the german armed forces during wwii. Like the enigma, it uses electromechanical cipher wheels to scramble the letters typed on the keyboard. With each key-press, the wheels move into a new position, thereby effectively changing the wiring and, hence, the alphabet substitution for each letter that is entered. And that's where the similarity with the enigma ends. Rather than presenting the output on a lamp panel, the fialka prints the coded letter directly onto a paper strip. At the same time it can punch the letter into the same paper tape in a 5-bit digital code, much like the baudot code of a teletype machine. In addition, fialka is equipped a paper tape transmitter that can be used to transmit or duplicate a message. During wwii, the russians have clearly learned from the flaws in the enigma's design and its operating procedures, as they have implemented the following improvements: 10 wheels, rather than 3 or 4 on the enigma, more frequent wheel turn-overs, adjacent wheels move in opposite directions, wheel wiring can be changed in the field (from 1978 onwards), a punched card is used to replace the steckerbrett, a letter can be encoded into itself (impossible on enigma). In addition to this, the following extra features are available: the use of letters, numbers and punctuation marks (m-125-3 only), possibility to duplicate a punched-paper tape, suitable as a standard teletype machine (in plaintext mode), supports both russian (cyrillic) and latin alphabets. Models two basic models of the machine are known. They are often referred to as the old model and the new model. Furthermore, country-specific variants were made for each country in which the m-125 was used. For the old model, this involved the wiring of the cipher wheels, but for the new model, this also involved the layout of the (language-dependent) keyboard and the print head less
The Confederate Signal Corps and Secret Service Cipher Wheel used by Secret Service operatives to encode and decode secret messages. Phrases such as “Complete Victory” or “Come Retribution” were used as code keys to align encoded or decoded letters.
Want to become a spy or special agent, catching bad guys and solving clues. This means you will need some homemade spy gear gadgets to keep you ahead of the game.
By the 1940s, sex was the one remaining activity which had never been observed.
