Ciphers · Keys · Hashes

Cryptography Explorer

Encrypt / Hash Learn Cryptography

Encrypt / Hash

Watch your own message get encrypted — and see what's going on under the hood.

Type any string and watch it get hashed or encrypted with the algorithms below — every intermediate number on screen, nothing simulated. Each lab starts in step mode: you advance the computation one card at a time with Next, and each card explains what just happened and why before you move on.

Prefer to watch? Press ▶ Play and it runs start to finish, slowed down, with a speed control — plus a scrubber to drag back to anything you missed.

For the full story behind each algorithm — the history, the why, and every step demonstrated on your own values — hit Learn Cryptography at the top.

Hash with SHA-256

Watch your message get padded, sliced into blocks, expanded into a message schedule, and folded through 64 rounds of compression into a unique 256-bit fingerprint.

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Encrypt with RSA

Pick two primes and build a real key pair — modulus, totient, public and private exponents — then watch your message get locked by one key and opened by the other.

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Cipher with Caesar & Vigenère

Two thousand years in one deck: shift your message like Caesar, watch letter-counting break it, then rotate through a keyword's alphabets — every addition shown, letter by letter.

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XOR & the one-time pad

Add bits without carry, build perfect secrecy, then reuse one pad and watch the secret cancel itself.

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Enigma

Step three rotors per keypress, trace the electrical path, and expose the reflector's never-self clue.

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AES-128

Transform a 4 × 4 byte state through ten real rounds—and derive the S-box instead of trusting a table.

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ChaCha20

Follow add–rotate–XOR quarter-rounds through a word grid and turn the mixed state into a keystream.

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Diffie–Hellman

Watch Alice and Bob derive one shared secret across a channel where every public value is visible.

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Elliptic curves & ECDH

Draw point addition, walk scalar multiplication, and repeat Diffie–Hellman with short curve keys.

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Signatures & HMAC

Give SHA-256 a key, turn an RSA digest into a signature, and reject a one-bit tamper.

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TLS handshake capstone

Assemble certificates, key exchange, hashing, HMAC, and AES into the browser padlock.

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Welcome

See for yourself how secrets are kept.

Cryptography runs on ideas that sound like magic — numbers that lock, keys that can be public, fingerprints for data. The magic evaporates the moment you watch the machinery turn. That is the whole purpose of this site.

Pick an algorithm, type your own message, and step through the real computation at your own pace. Nothing is simulated: the numbers on screen are the actual algorithm running in your browser.

LT Sean Egan, PhD & AG1 Derek Conklin
A U.S. Navy partnership building learning tools for our METOC, space, cyber, and cryptologic colleagues.

About this project

Hey—we're Sean and Derek.

Cryptography Explorer is meant to make the invisible visible: the encryption and hashing algorithms you trust every day, run live on your own input, slowed down far enough to actually understand.

It grew out of two terminal animations we used as teaching aids — Greg Walker's wonderful SHA-256 Animation (MIT licensed) and a companion RSA animation built in its spirit by AG1 Derek Conklin. The web gave us room those terminals never had: richer explanations at every step, a scrubbable timeline, and animations you can rewind.

Creators LT Sean Egan, PhD & AG1 Derek Conklin

United States Navy · A partnership building learning tools for our METOC, space, cyber, and cryptologic colleagues.

sean@theinformed.org

Independent educational project, built by us on our own time. The views expressed here are ours alone and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Navy, the Department of War / Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government, nor do we represent them. This site is intended for learning, not operations — do not use it for operational decisions; use it at your own risk. The algorithms here use deliberately tiny numbers and simplified (unpadded) constructions so every value stays readable. They are teaching toys: never use them to protect real secrets.