Hawkynt

Scytale Cipher

Ancient Spartan transposition cipher using a staff for military communications in classical antiquity. A scytale reorders the marks on a strip of parchment and never looks at what they are, so this implementation accepts every byte: the message is written across a grid of ‘circumference’ columns and read off column by column, and the inverse puts it back. No byte is dropped, altered, case-folded or padded, and the round trip is exact for arbitrary input of any length.

Properties

Property Value
Category Classical Ciphers
Sub-category Transposition Cipher
Security status 🎓 Educational Only
Complexity Beginner
Inventor Ancient Spartans
Year -500
Origin 🏛️ Ancient
Source algorithms/classical/scytale.js

Security

Status: 🎓 Educational Only

No vulnerabilities are recorded for this implementation.

Documentation

References

Test vectors

2 vectors ship with this algorithm and run in the test suite. Byte values are hexadecimal.

Vector 1 — Circumference 3 over a message that does not fill the last row. The Wikipedia article works a different message, so it carries no value for this input

Field Value
key 33
input 5745415245464f554e444f5554
expected 57524f44544545554f41464e55

Vector 2 — Circumference 4 over a message that fills the grid exactly. The Wikipedia article works a different message, so it carries no value for this input

Field Value
key 34
input 41545441434b41544441574e
expected 414344544b4154415741544e

← All algorithms

This site is open source. Improve this page.