How the cipher identifier works

Paste in text, numbers or symbols from a puzzle and CacheCrack runs it past every tool it has. Some codes give themselves away by the characters they use, like the dots and dashes of Morse code or the ones and zeros of binary. For those, CacheCrack decodes the text and checks that the result makes sense.

For ciphers made of letters, it tries the ones that can be cracked without a key, like Caesar, Atbash, reversed text and rail fence, and looks for real English in the results. If none of them work, it studies how often each letter appears to tell a substitution cipher from one that uses a keyword, like Vigenère, and can often guess how long that keyword is.

Images and sound

Drop, paste or choose an image or sound file and CacheCrack sends it to the right analyzer. Images are checked for GPS details, hidden files, messages in the pixel bits, QR codes, steghide and OpenStego. Sound files, including MP3, are checked for Morse beeps and touch-tone digits and shown as a spectrogram.

Puzzles in layers

When one decode gives something that is itself another code, like Base64 that turns into Caesar-shifted text or hex that turns into Morse, CacheCrack looks one layer deeper and shows the whole chain with the final answer. Press Open as a recipe to see every step and reuse it on similar puzzles.

It also recognizes coordinates in UTM, MGRS, Plus Code, Maidenhead and Geohash formats, links to coordinate checkers, and ciphers that need a key, like ADFGVX, Gromark and Enigma-style five-letter groups, so it can point you to the right tool.

Getting the best results

Paste the whole code rather than a piece of it. Short texts give rougher guesses, so try the top few suggestions. Each suggestion has a button that opens the right tool with your text already loaded. Some puzzles use several layers, so after one decode, paste the result back in and try again.