This is for pedagogical purposes. Please do not cypher actually important messages with this.
Anyway I think it can bring with little ones, and adults alike, interesting conversations around :
- secrecy
- privacy
- cryptography as counter-power
- mathematics, starting with modulo
- the duration a message can stay undecipherable and thus the kind of message to share
- computational complexity, how many permutations are available
… and a lot more!
Actually no I use it for CRYSTALS-Kyber /s
Yes, just joking it’s not even meant for a “replacement” but rather how to give a pragmatic affordable (the 1st one I made was literally just 2 paper strips and scotch tape) fun way to explore ROT… but IMHO it can be just a starting point. You can do that and sequence them, e.g. ROT-X where X is the date so e.g. today is 06 12 2025 so you would ROT0 the first letter, ROT6 the second, etc.
It is only meant to be fun, please don’t use this in actual serious situations.
FWIW changing ROT is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigenère_cipher as @drspod@lemmy.ml pointed out, I already learned something!