Inspired by the Lifehacker article of “How to Write Down and Encrypt Your Passwords with an Old-School Tabula Recta” I have thrown together my own web-based Tabula Recta generator.

This is a just a quick proof of concept. I don’t shift the characters but generate a random character from a limited character set (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxys0123456789!@#$%^&*()+_-{}|;<>?) using the mt_rand PHP function. I also only use lowercase alpha characters for this test.

Feel free to use and print out.

Generate Tabula Recta

**UPDATE**

After I posted this and thought about it I for the life of me don’t know why I just didn’t post the code. So here it is. Very simplified, but a good starting point to build on possibly if someone is interested in taking it further.

<table style="border: 1px solid black;;font-family: verdana;font-size:16pt"
cellpadding="0" cellspading="0">
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid black">&nbsp;</td><?php
function rand_char($chars = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789!@#$%^&*()+_-{}|;<>?ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ')
{
$string = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < 1; $i++)
{
$pos = rand(0, strlen($chars)-1);
$string .= $chars{$pos};
}
return $string;
}
$letterarray = array('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't' ,'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y','z');
$count = count($letterarray);
for ($i = 0; $i < $count; $i++) {
echo "<td style='border: 1px solid black;font-weight:900' width='30' align='center'>".$letterarray[$i]."</td>";
}
echo "</tr>";
for ($i = 0; $i < $count; $i++) {
echo "<tr><td style='border: 1px solid black;font-weight:900' align='center'>".$letterarray[$i]."</td>";
for($s=0; $s < $count; $s++)
{
echo "<td style='border: 1px solid black' align='center'>".rand_char()."</td>";
}
echo "</tr>";
}
?>
</tr>
</table>


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