Explore the Collection · 13 Featured Ciphers

◆Caesar Cipher · 58 BC ◆Alberti Disk · 1467 ◆Vigenère · 1553 ◆Bacon's Cipher · 1605 ◆Jefferson Disk · 1795 ◆Playfair · 1854 ◆Stager Cipher · 1861 ◆ADFGVX · 1918 ◆Enigma Machine · 1932 ◆Lorenz Cipher · 1940 ◆One-Time Pad · Perfect Secrecy ◆VIC Cipher · Cold War ◆Tap Code · Hanoi Hilton

Est. 150 BC — Present Day

Explore the History of Encryption

37 ciphers, 10 exhibit halls, and 2,500 years of codebreaking — all in one place.

37Historic Ciphers

10Exhibit Halls

2,500+Years of History

1Unbreakable Cipher

Start with Caesar Cipher → Try the Playground View Museum Map

Start Here

Choose Your Path

Explore History

Browse ciphers by era — from ancient Greece to the Cold War.

Enter the Timeline →

Learn How Ciphers Work

Substitution, transposition, and the ideas that became modern encryption.

Start Learning →

Try a Challenge

Crack real ciphers, from beginner to expert.

Take a Challenge →

Try It Now

Live Cipher Playground

Cipher

Plaintext

Output

Want more ciphers and frequency analysis? Open the full Workbench →

2,500 Years in Three Acts

The Story of Encryption

Act I · Pen & Paper

150 BC – 1900

From Caesar's shift to Vigenère's "indecipherable cipher" — every method broken by frequency analysis.

Act II · Machines & War

From WWI field systems to Enigma and Lorenz in WWII, ending with the first codebreaking computers.

Act III · Mathematics Wins

1945 – Present

From post-war information theory to modern cryptography: Shannon's 1949 proof and the rise of mathematical security.

View Full Timeline →

An open-source educational project documenting the complete history of cryptography using publicly available sources. No tracking. No backend. Just history.