How does a coded message get solved?
In: Mathematics
There isn’t just one way that always works. It depends on how complex the code is, whether you have, or can guess, some of the plaintext that the code represents, or sheer hard work of working through all the combinations.
A very simple one like a Caesar cipher where the whole alphabet is just shifted along a few characters can be solved just by working through all the combinations. At the next level where the substitution for a given letter is random but always the same, working from the known frequency of occurrence of particular letters is the usual approach. Then it goes up in complexity to something like the German Enigma machine where the substitution changes as each successive character is encyphered. That needs all sorts of techniques. Guessing plaintext, looking for certain patterns, capturing guidebooks and working through possible combinations after the previous techniques have reduced their number to a manageable size.
Some codes are fundamentally unbreakable. The “one time pad” where an encryption of each character is made using a randomly generated list and can only be decrypted by the recipient having the same list. If it’s truly random (not a computer generated pseudo-random list) and each list is used only once it can be mathematically proved to be unbreakable.
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