How to decipher an ADFGVX cipher? I got introduced to the ADFGVX cipher, and it seems very tedious to decipher such ciphertexts. If I do not have access to the key square and the keyword, and I am just given the ciphertext and a string of numbers, how do you decipher it? The columnar transposition is another thing that makes it even more difficult to break. (I am assuming that ADFGVX comes with a columnar transposition). I am planning on making a code that can break it. A complete brute force seems possible, just too tiresome.
As you must know, ADFGVX is a German cipher from World War I. It was broken by the French (Painvin) during that war, but not without a major effort, and only on certain days.

It uses fractionation and a Polybius square, followed by a columnar transposition based on a keyword.

In Milton F. Friedman's Military Cryptanalysis, Part IV, pp. 103-149, he goes into detail about how to break this cipher.

There is also a useful paper from 1984, Konheim, A. G. (n.d.). Cryptanalysis of Adfgvx Encipherment Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 339–341. doi:10.1007/3-540-39568-7_26 (an extended abstract)

Konheim presents a four-step cryptanalytic technique to break ADFGVX.


Determine which column vectors are adjacent in the array.
Determine the relative order of the pairs of column vectors.
Recover the substitution.
Recover the transposition order of the columns in the array.


One thing that could be looked at first is this: perhaps the Polybius square is not a mixed alphabet after all, but alphabetical.