The phrase "cipher by" is grammatically correct and can be used in written English.
It means to decode or decipher something. Example: The detective was able to cipher by the cryptic message and solve the case.
Attacking an Obfuscated Cipher by Injecting Faults.
To most people, Indonesia is a cipher, by far the least-known of the world's great nations.
The great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 1855) believed that he had devised an unbreakable cipher by introducing homophones.
Kate's sister, Bianca, portrayed too much as a cipher by Yan Chen, was taunted aggressively by Ms. Jaffe.
Appearing in almost every picture, Jesus is a pretty, white-robed, impassive cipher; by comparison, most of the other characters seem humanly full-blooded.
Next to these now-departed characters, Hope Hicks was a decidedly recessive cast member, almost a cipher by her own design.
" 'Dunkirk': A War Movie About Patriotic Ciphers," by Richard Brody.
The Venetians used such outposts as intelligence sources and even developed codes and ciphers by which information could be secretly communicated.
The resulting coded data is then encrypted into ciphers by using the Data Encryption Standard or the Advanced Encryption Standard DESS or AES; described in the section History of cryptology).
The first European manual on cryptography (c. 1379) was a compilation of ciphers by Gabriele de Lavinde of Parma, who served Pope Clement VII.
In this paper, we present attacks on different number of rounds of these lightweight block ciphers by using the biclique cryptanalysis technique recently developed for cryptanalysis of the hash functions Skein-512 and SHA-2 and the Advanced Encryption Standard.
