Tools / Rail Fence Cipher
Rail Fence Cipher Decoder
The rail fence is a transposition cipher: write your plaintext in a zigzag across N rails, then read off each rail row by row. The key is just the number of rails (and an optional starting offset). Pick brute-force decode to scan rail counts 2-10 against every offset.
Output
Output appears here.How to recognize a rail fence
Rail fence preserves the multiset of letters -the ciphertext has the same letter frequencies as the plaintext, just rearranged. If your ciphertext has English-looking letter distribution but no readable words, it’s a transposition cipher.
For other transposition variants try the Cipher Identifier first. For substitution-based ciphers, see the Frequency Analysis and Vigenere tools.