# Simple Ciphers One of the earliest encryption methods, Ciphers, were used to encrypt plaintext into something called ciphertext.\ The simplest way to do this would be to use a **Caesar Cipher**.\ Named after Julius Caesar, Caesar encrypted his messages with this cipher, making messages seem like gibberish to the normal eye, but very easy to decrypt.\ Anyways, enough with the caesar cipher history lesson, let's move on to other ciphers. A **Vigenère cipher** uses what a Caesar Cipher built a basis on, except an alphanumerical key is used.\\ * Caesar cipher only has 26 usable values, `1-26` This makes the Vigenère cipher a lot harder to crack.\ These further advancements lead to much stronger encryption, making messages harder to crack, due to an increase in the number of charcters used to encode / encrypt the messages. This Vigenere cipher was also used in this [writeup from DawgCTF 2020](https://github.com/TheWinRaRs/References/blob/master/Crypto). --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://the-winrars.gitbook.io/references/crypto/simple-ciphers.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.