Caesar Cipher Brute-Force (All 25 Shifts)

The Caesar cipher shifts each letter a fixed number of places through the alphabet. Since only 25 useful shifts exist — the twenty-sixth returns the original text — brute-forcing it is trivial: generate all 25 possibilities and see which makes sense. That attack has its own name in classical cryptanalysis, exhaustive search, and this cipher is its canonical example.

Paste the text and the page produces all 25 possible readings at once, numbered by shift. Someone enciphering picks the line matching the agreed shift; someone breaking it scans the list until they find the one forming words. On a text of a few words that takes seconds, and it is exactly that speed the page makes obvious.

One useful detail: shift 13 is ROT13, which has the property of being its own inverse — apply it twice and you get the original back. It was never a protective cipher, but a convention for hiding puzzle answers and spoilers from casual view. Note too that spaces and punctuation are preserved, and the shape of the words alone gives away a good deal of a short text.