Keyboard Shift Cipher

Keyboard key shifting is a substitution cipher that involves replacing each letter in a text with a neighboring letter on the keyboard. This type of cipher takes advantage of the physical layout of the keys, creating a lateral, vertical, or diagonal shift effect.

To encode by keyboard shift, select a keyboard layout (AZERTY or QWERTY, or other) and a shift direction (right, left, up, down, or diagonal) then replace each character in the text with the one located at the chosen position after shifting.

Decryption is identical to encryption, but with an inverted direction: a right shifting encoding becomes a left shifting decoding.

The ciphered message is composed only of keyboard keys.

One key near to E appears the most.

This encryption is sometimes involuntary and due to poor hand placement on a keyboard.

In addition to the keyboard type variant, it is often the shift that allows you to create variants:

— Fixed shift: use a constant shift (for example, always shift one key to the right).

— Variable shift: change the direction or magnitude of the shift for each letter (for example, shift 1, then 2, then 3, or shift by rotation: up, then right, then down, etc.)

— Shift by ignoring certain keys (this is usually the case for the CTRL, ALT, SHIFT or TAB keys)

— Shift by ignoring symbols