Tabula recta
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In cryptography, the tabula recta is a square table of alphabets, each row of which is made by shifting the previous one to the left. The term was invented by Johannes Trithemius in 1518.
Trithemius used the tabula recta to define a polyalphabetic cipher which was equivalent to Leon Battista Alberti's cipher disk. The tabula recta is often referred to in discussing pre-computer ciphers, including the Vigenère cipher and Blaise de Vigenère's less well-known (but much stronger) autokey cipher. All polyalphabetic ciphers based on Caesar ciphers can be described in terms of the tabula recta.
In order to encrypt a plaintext, one locates the row with the first letter to be encrypted, and the column with the first letter of the key. The letter where the line and column cross is the ciphertext letter.
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Classical cryptography
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| Ciphers: ADFGVX | Affine | Alberti | Atbash | Autokey | Bifid | Book | Caesar | Four-square | Hill | Keyword | Nihilist | Permutation | Pigpen | Playfair | Polyalphabetic | Polybius | Rail Fence | Reihenschieber | Reservehandverfahren | ROT13 | Running key | Scytale | Solitaire | Straddling checkerboard | Substitution | Tap Code | Transposition | Trifid | Two-square | VIC cipher | Vigenère |
| Cryptanalysis: Frequency analysis | Index of coincidence |
| Misc: Cryptogram | Bacon | Polybius square | Scytale | Straddling checkerboard | Tabula recta |
| History of cryptography | Cryptanalysis | Cryptography portal | Topics in cryptography |
| Symmetric-key algorithm | Block cipher | Stream cipher | Public-key cryptography | Cryptographic hash function | Message authentication code | Random numbers |
