The Workshop
The Cipher Vault
Five working ciphers, one bench. Type something in, see what comes out, change the key, watch it shift. Each tool below uses the same decoder logic the films do. The math, anyway.
I · Book Cipher
The Ottendorf
A book cipher. Triplets — paragraph, sentence, word — point into a known key text. Take the first letter of each word you land on and read in order. Pre-loaded with the homepage VAULT puzzle.
Paragraphs separated by blank lines. Sentences end at a period. Words split on whitespace.
One triplet per line. Paragraph, sentence, word. All 1-indexed.
Decoded
From the films: the cipher Thomas Gates carried in 1865, and the cipher Charles Carroll left for Thomas Gates in 1832.
How does it work?
Lemon juice on parchment
Move the candle across the page. The juice darkens under heat and the message comes through.
Move your cursor over the parchment.
The poem above is the engraving from the meerschaum pipe stem found in the Charlotte’s hold — line one of Ben’s 1974 family story.
II · Polygraphic
The Playfair
A 5×5 matrix cipher invented by Charles Wheatstone in 1854, named for his friend Lyon Playfair. Riley keys it “DEATH” when the gang decode the missing Booth diary page in Book of Secrets.
Riley keyed it “DEATH” — the Book-of-Secrets default. Try LIBERTY, BOOTH, or your own.
I/J share a cell. Repeated letters get an X inserted. Output is always uppercase.
5×5 Matrix
| D | E | A | T | H |
| B | C | F | G | I |
| K | L | M | N | O |
| P | Q | R | S | U |
| V | W | X | Y | Z |
Result
From the films: how Riley reads the page Booth scrawled on the way out of Ford’s Theatre.
III · Substitution
The Caesar Shift
The oldest and simplest. Slide the alphabet by a fixed number of letters. ROT13 — shift thirteen — is its own inverse.
Result
From the films: not specifically called out, but every cipher down this list is a generalization of the Caesar.
IV · Polyalphabetic
The Vigenère
A keyworded Caesar, repeated. Each letter shifts by the matching letter of a repeating key. Considered unbreakable for nearly three centuries; Friedrich Kasiski cracked it in 1863 — the same decade Booth was scrawling Playfair on diary pages.
Letters only. The key folds to A-Z and repeats over the message.
Result
From the films: the genre of cipher the Founders would have recognized. Jefferson and Madison kept Vigenère tables for their diplomatic correspondence.
V · Mechanical
Jefferson’s Wheel
Thomas Jefferson’s personal cipher device. Thirty-six disks of letters on a common spindle, each independently rotatable. Align the message on one row; any other row is the ciphertext. Six disks here — the principle is the same.
Puzzle
Find the place
Spell a word that means a chamber where things lie hidden. Three letters in, you'll feel it.
Reading row
Click a disk to select it. Drag to rotate. Use ← / → with a disk focused for a single-letter step.
Jefferson’s original wheel had thirty-six disks. We’ve scaled to six for legibility — the principle is the same.
From the films: gestured at, never quite shown. Jefferson is on the document; this is what he carried in his coat pocket.
Decoders made for fan use. No actual treasure is unsealed by any of these.
See the Declaration in detail →