# Decrypting transposition ciphers

How do I see if the following ciphertext eaeairtntrnaeemtve is a transposition cipher, using letter frequency?

This article suggest how to detect by using letter frequency detection and cryptanalysis but I am unsure of how to do this. Any suggestions?

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This was simultaneously cross-posted on Crypto.SE and this site (crypto.stackexchange.com/q/12689/351). Please don't cross-post. That is prohibited by StackExchange rules. In the future, if you discover that you posted on the wrong site, you can click the flag link to flag your post for moderator attention and ask them to migrate it, but you should never cross-post. –  D.W. Jan 3 at 8:21
@DavidRicherby, nope! Look again. The cross-post on Crypto.SE was posted 2014-01-02 15:15:03Z by user10877 -- i.e., yesterday, the same day as this was posted. It was subsequently marked as a duplicate of crypto.stackexchange.com/q/3826/351, which was posted on Sept 18 2012 -- but I'm referring to the post by user10877. Perhaps your browser is auto-redirecting you to the dup, so make sure to look at the post by user10877, not the one it was marked as a dup of. –  D.W. Jan 3 at 19:43
@DavidRicherby, regarding your comment about the questions being similar, make sure you look at the original revision. Incidentally, the wording of the two posts is identical. The Crypto.SE post was subsequently edited by Ilmari Karonen to improve the wording a bit, and this post was edited by Gilles after it was posted, so make sure to look at revision 1 of both posts: to see what I mean, compare crypto.stackexchange.com/revisions/12689/1 to cs.stackexchange.com/revisions/19453/1. –  D.W. Jan 3 at 19:44
@joker, if you didn't cross-post, how did these two posts end up with exactly identical wording? Compare the two "rev 1" versions I linked to, and notice how the wording is 100% word-for-word identical: not just similar, but identical. The timing of the two posts was also extremely similar: the Crypto one was posted on 2014-01-02 15:15:03Z, the CS one was posted on 2014-01-02 15:19:39Z (less than 5 minutes later). Got an explanation for that? –  D.W. Jan 3 at 19:47
@D.W. Ah, I see. Yes, I was being redirected to the duplicate; yes, the two original revisions you link to are identical (apart from capitalization of the title) and were posted within five minutes of each other. Good detective work! –  David Richerby Jan 3 at 22:24

It might be problematic to use letter frequency when you have short ciphertext.

Anyway, this is transposition cipher! so your plaintext is probably some permutation of the ciphertext.

You have $18 = 3 \cdot 6$ chars. Try to write them as a rectangle of $3 \times 6$ or $6 \times 3$ and read it in different ways (spiral, zigzag, etc.).

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