CIPHERNAUT
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Cipher catalogue
GraphicDifficulty: Hard

Bitmap cipher

Letters as pictures made of squares - hidden as a barcode, an inverse, colours or compressed numbers.

Try it

27 characters

Result · Bitmap cipher

011.100.010.001.110 111.100.110.100.111 011.100.100.100.011 110.101.110.101.101 111.100.110.100.111 111.010.010.010.010 / 10001.11011.10101.10001.10001 111.100.110.100.111 011.100.010.001.110 011.100.010.001.110 010.101.111.101.101 0111.1000.1011.1001.0111 111.100.110.100.111 / 111.100.110.100.100 010.101.101.101.010 110.101.110.101.101 / 111.010.010.010.010 101.101.111.101.101 111.100.110.100.111 / 011.100.100.100.011 100.100.100.100.111 101.101.101.101.111 110.101.110.101.110

How it works

  1. 1Every letter is a tiny picture made of squares: 5 rows tall and 1 to 5 columns wide. A black square is filled, a white one is empty.
  2. 2The picture is then disguised: stretched into a barcode, inverted (only the empty squares are drawn), coloured (filled squares cold, empty ones warm) or turned into numbers.
  3. 3The numbers come in two forms: run lengths (how many filled squares in a row, then how many empty ones, starting with filled) or the coordinates of filled squares as row + column.
  4. 4To decode, rebuild the picture and read the letters. There is always one empty column between letters.

Example

HI

Did you know

Letters made of dots are an old idea: characters were shown that way on displays and printers. Run-length encoding (RLE) is used, for example, in fax machines. Hiding letters in a pixel grid and its variants is inspired by the Cipher tool by Radek Pelanek; the pixel font here is our own, so the letter shapes may differ from his site.

Try to decode

This message is encrypted with Bitmap cipher using the default settings:

Hint

Each letter picture is 5 squares tall. Copy the picture onto squared paper while you decode.

Show solution

HEY

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