The Vigenère Cipher

Giovan Battista Bellaso, an Italian cryptographer, invented the Vigenère Cipher in 1553; however, Blaise de Vigenère, to whom it was mistakenly assigned, is where the name comes from. Despite being a pretty straightforward code, it took more than 300 years to crack. In essence, it served as a stark example of how something may pass you by even though it is right in front of you.

It was referred to as "the unbreakable cipher" back in the day, despite how simple many today tend to think it is to crack. The Vigenère Square, a polyalphabetic substitution algorithm, is used to create the code.

The Square entails 26 repetitions of the letters. To generate a table of substitutes, each line is shifted one space to the left of the one before it. After selecting a keyword that may be utilized to decrypt it, you would employ multiple alphabets to generate the code throughout the cipher.

In 1861, a German soldier who was also a codebreaker deciphered the cipher by observing the pattern of repetition. You can really seek up a ton of examples on how to use it to encrypt or decrypt your own messages if you're interested.