Did you know that even though the Vigenère cipher was considered the strongest cipher during the American Civil War, the Union could regularly crack its messages? This weakness was due to the Confederate States of America relying heavily on just three key phrases: Manchester Bluff, Complete Victory, and as the war neared its end, Come Retribution. The cipher itself operates by encoding each letter of the plaintext with a Caesar cipher dependent on a corresponding letter of a key text. However, t