Rail Fence Cipher
WECRLTEERDSOEEFEAOCAIVDEN
Encode text along the fence
Write the message diagonally down and up across the chosen number of rails, then read each rail left to right. More rails scatter the letters further apart, but the cipher stays easy to break by trying every rail count.
When to use this tool
Reach for the Rail Fence cipher when a puzzle, CTF challenge, or classroom lesson calls for a transposition cipher — one that reorders characters instead of replacing them. It is the canonical, easy-to-grasp counterpart to the substitution ciphers here (Caesar, Vigenère, Atbash): the letters of the message are written in a zig-zag across a few rails and read back row by row, scrambling their order while keeping every character intact.
Privacy and limitations
Everything runs locally in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere. This is a classical cipher, not real encryption — with only a handful of sensible rail counts, a Rail Fence message is trivial to break by trying each one. Because it is a transposition, every character including spaces, digits, and punctuation is preserved and merely repositioned, and encoding then decoding at the same rail count returns the original exactly.