Caesar

Explanation

The Caesar cipher is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques. It's a type of substitution cipher where each letter in the plaintext is shifted a certain number of places down or up the alphabet.

For encryption a shift value is used which determines how many letters forward each letter in the text should be shifted.

Decryption uses the same shift, but shifts each letter down rather than up.

The Caesar cipher is a special case of the substitution cipher with a fixed shift. While it's straightforward to implement and understand, it's also highly vulnerable to cryptanalysis, especially through frequency analysis.

With only 25 possible keys, it's easily broken by trying all possible shifts. Despite its simplicity, it's still sometimes used as a part of more complex encryption algorithms or for educational purposes.

Facts

The Caesar cipher, named after Julius Caesar who is said to have used it for personal communication.

There are only 25 possible keys making this extremely vulnerable to brute force attacks.