One of the projects I have worked on is a text scrambler app that takes a message and password as inputs to scramble the message mixed with random letters. The original message is returned if you provide the scrambled letters and the password used to scramble the letters. While I like the design, I was unhappy with a few drawbacks that had not been accounted for. My primary grievance is that the addition of random letters makes the scrambled message size significantly longer than necessary, and actually serves to limit the overall size of the message and/or password substantially in my code implementation. Another problem is that there is no penalty for wrong passwords, meaning that the correct password could easily be brute-forced by someone who knows what they are doing. With these problems in mind, I set out to make a better version that does not expand the output too much, and can even detect wrong passwords without actually knowing the true password. I accomplished this by switching to a number system where each character is represented by a two-digit index from 01 to 85. When the numbers are then scrambled it becomes what I believe to be impossible to piece together which digits correspond to each possible character. Additionally, when an incorrect password is provided, impossible index values are often created (00 and 86-99) indicating that the user does not have the correct password. This has allowed me to penalize the user when incorrect passwords are detected, locking them out for 30 seconds after 3 incorrect submissions. You can see how I have written the code here, and compare it to the original scrambler app here. I debated on not providing the code for the app, because the incorrect submission penalty would then be easily removable, entirely undermining its purpose. But of course, the purpose of these applications is not truly secure cryptography, as I really have no way of validating that. Rather, using statistical machinery as a method of cryptography is an interesting application that I think is worth exploring and sharing openly. Thank you for trying my app and don’t forget to clear the message fields before you use them!