Short description:
Scytale is an ancient transposition cipher that arranges text along a strip wound around a rod of a given circumference. Reading characters along the rod produces the ciphertext; unwinding yields the original text when the same circumference is used.
Implementation:
- Implementations and tests may be present in C, C++ and Rust subdirectories.
Algorithm (brief):
- Choose a circumference (number of rows or columns depending on convention).
- Write the plaintext along the rod (filling rows or columns) and read off in the orthogonal direction to produce the ciphertext.
- Decoding uses the same circumference to reconstruct the original ordering.
Example:
Input: "ATTACKATDAWN", circumference = 3 Output: ciphertext produced by reading the transposed matrix (format depends on implementation).