Fractionated Morse Cipher Decryption
Your alarm goes off and, after hitting “snooze” once or twice, you pry yourself out of bed. You make a cup of coffee to help you get going, and then you shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, and check your phone for messages. On your way to school, you stop to fill your car’s gas tank, almost making you late for the first day of chemistry class. As you find a seat in the classroom, you read the question projected on the screen: “Welcome to class! Why should we study chemistry”
Figure (1)
Key Points
- Morse code is a telecommunications method which encodes text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called dots and dashes, or dits and dahs.
- The ciphertext is sent through an insecure channel to the recipient.
- In the rail fence cipher, the plaintext is written downward and diagonally on successive "rails" of an imaginary fence, then moves up when it gets to the bottom.
Terms
Tap a term for a plain-language explanation.
Sources & licensing(4)
- OpenStax — openstax.org/books/chemistry-2e/pages/1-introduction (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0)
- Wikipedia contributors — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_cipher (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)
- Wikipedia contributors — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)
- Wikipedia contributors — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)