Member-only story
ROT 8000 and what “security” means
AKA, “infosec is a team sport.”
If you’re an Internet Person of a Certain Vintage, you’ll likely experience the same thrill of delight I felt this morning when I discovered ROT8000, a Unicode version of the old ROT13 cipher. But after I finished smiling, I got to thinking.
ROT13 is a toy cipher with a simple method for scrambling text — simply change each character in the message to the character that comes 13 letters after it in the alphabet: A=M, B=N, C=O, etc. You’re ROTating each character 13 positions forward — hence, ROT13.
The cool thing about ROT13 is how you unscramble the message — just rotate each scrambled letter 13 positions forward again, so that it moves a full circle around the alphabet — ROT13+ROT13=ROT26, and there are 26 letters in the alphabet, so ROT26 takes you back to the start.
A+13=M. M+13=A. Or, put another way: A+26=A.
ROT8000 brings ROT13 into the modern digital environment. Our crude, Roman-alphabet-only systems have been upgraded to the Unicode standard, with a whopping 16,000-characters, incorporating many alphabets, symbols and emojis.
Here’s a sentence in plaintext. Here it is in ROT8000:
