The Alien Cipher

Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE
2 min readJan 28, 2024

Can you solve this:

The art of solving puzzles is often at the core of cybersecurity skills. Whether you are twiddling bits or searching for byte patterns, there’s a core skill of understanding how to convert something that is hidden to something that can be seen.

And, so, Capture The Flags (CTF) and cipher challenges are great ways to train your mind in solving these puzzles. For this, I’ve created an alien cipher code. It is fairly easy to solve, as there is no cipher keys used, and where it is just basically an encoding method. For this, we can use UTF-8 to extend our character set with a hexadecimal or integer value. The alphabet we will use is:

⏃⏚☊⎅⟒⎎☌⊑⟟⟊☍⌰⋔⋏⍜⌿⍾⍀⌇⏁⎍⎐⍙⌖⊬⋉

and where ‘a’ is ⏃ and ‘b’ is ⏚ (don’t ask me why an alien might think an earth symbol is a b). In C#, we can then derive the coding from [here]:

     public static string getAlien(string s)
{
s = s.ToLower();
string rtn = "";



string[] mapping = { "⏃", "⏚", "☊", "⎅",
"⟒", "⎎", "☌", "⊑", "⟟",
"⟊", "☍", "⌰"…

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Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE
Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE

Written by Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE

Professor of Cryptography. Serial innovator. Believer in fairness, justice & freedom. Based in Edinburgh. Old World Breaker. New World Creator. Building trust.

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