Patience is generally going to be the biggest tool. Remembering that a negative result is almost as valuable as a positive result is important.MrBlah wrote:As much as I have read into ciphers and cryptography in the past couple weeks, I am still lost and am clearly missing some valuable tools to solving these.
If your instinct says that something is a given trick, at least give that trick a try before dismissing it. There have been at least two ciphers here where the correct solution was identified, but wasn't tried until later.
Even without being able to read a thing, you can tell certain aspects about a cipher which can be useful. The number of symbols being used is the first clue.
- If there are only a couple dozen symbols (say 20-40) you're probably looking at an alphabetic writing system, similar to English. From a cipher perspective, this means you're probably looking at one symbol = one letter type substitutions, with maybe some extra symbols thrown in (puncuation, spaces, dipthongs, or doublings). That doesn't mean it's always represents the same letter every time, but the cipher symbol itself is only one letter.
- If there are several dozen up to maybe a bit over 100 symbols, you may be looking at a syllabic writing system, or (in English) each normal letter is represented by many values. Syllabic writing is where each syllable, or more frequently digraph (two letters together) gets its own symbol. The word "Individual" would be written with 5-7 characters, either In-di-vi-du-al or I-ne-di-vi-du-a-le (in some systems, like Mycenean Greek, every syllable is either pure vowel, or consonant-vowel - never pure consonant or vowel-consonant). In a cipher context, it could go two ways. I might be the above where the cipher symbol represents a digraph or syllable, or it could also mean that multiple cipher symbols mean the same thing. Perhaps E, being the most common letter in English at around 13%, is represented by 13 different symbols out of 100.
- If the writing system is truly vast, many hundreds to several thousand symbols, you could be looking at ideographic writing. Chinese is a ready example of this, where words and ideas are represented by pictographic symbols. You don't need many symbols to write a word (often just 1 symbol), but you need a vast quantity of different symbols to be able to write anything worthwhile. From a cipher perspective, this many symbols is probably indicative of a language other than English, or if it is English, you'll need huge quantities of message text to begin the process of pattern identification and such.
Here, for example, is the frequency distribution of the Gettysburg Address using a simple (monoalphabetic) substition, a 4 alphabet system, and a 13 alphabet system: