2.1. Reverse Cipher

Let’s start our work with the simplest transposition cipher, the reverse cipher. In this cipher, your plaintext is written in reverse order starting with the last character in the plaintext.

plaintext:  a rose by any other name would smell as sweet
ciphertext: TEEWS SALLE MSDLU OWEMA NREHT OYNAY BESOR A

At first glance you may not recognize the message, but you could probably tell quickly by the double letters EE and LL that it was closely related to the English language. In fact, the ciphertext retains a lot of the properties of the plaintext that it was produced from.

When using the Reverse Cipher, there is only 1 way to complete the transposition, so there is only 1 key for enciphering and deciphering messages.