Vic Cipher

The VIC cipher is the one classical cipher that actually earned its scary reputation - a Soviet spy cipher so fiddly that its namesake, Reino Häyhänen (codenamed "VICTOR"), kept a cheat sheet on a coin for it. In the ARG Toolkit it's the node that looks like the crown jewel of the cryptography section and is currently the least likely to run. Straight talk: as shipped, this node throws IndexError: list index out of range with its default settings. I ran the actual code path against the pinned secretpy version the pack ships and it dies every single time at alphabet setup. If you're here to decrypt a VIC ciphertext and it fails instantly, that's the node, not you.

The VIC cipher is a digit-driven straddling checkerboard: letters get mapped to single- or double-digit codes, the digits get shuffled through transposition, and a key digits string shifts the result. It was famously complex for a pencil-and-paper cipher, which is the whole point - it's a classic ARG flex. Fair warning, though: what this node actually implements is secretpy's simplified Vic, a digit-keyed bifid-style substitution. It's a distant cousin of the full five-step Cold War procedure the author's own docs describe, so treat it as a flavor of the real thing, not the real thing.

The inputs are the standard classical-cipher quartet plus a numeric key:

• text - the message, multiline, defaults to "Hello World!".
• mode - true encrypts, false decrypts. One toggle, easy to forget to flip on the way back.
• keep_formatting - true keeps spaces, punctuation, and capitalization; false strips everything and lowercases before encrypting. For ciphers this is usually the "readable output" switch, but it also changes the ciphertext, so both sides of a round trip need to agree.
• key - the tooltip says "a string of numbers (punctuation optional), anything not a number is ignored."
• alphabet - default ENGLISH, but you can paste your own connected alphabet like abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz or use any name from secretpy.alphabets.

Output is one encrypted_txt string, ready to feed into a text display node or the pack's converter nodes.

Now the part you actually need. The IndexError happens because secretpy's Vic builds its substitution table from a 10-column grid and expects blank marker cells in the alphabet to signal row breaks. None of the predefined alphabets have them, so the moment the cipher hits a letter in the second row, it tries to index an empty list and explodes. I verified that a 30-cell alphabet with blank slots at positions 0, 10, and 20 does run the underlying cipher - so there's a workaround if you're determined, but you're swimming against the current. There's also a second quirk waiting behind it: the node's key preprocessing line does str(int(ch) for ch in key if ch.isdigit()), which converts a generator object to a string rather than joining the digits. The tooltip's "anything not a number is ignored" promise isn't quite what the code does. As of pack v2.2.1, treat this node as broken-in-box and reach for Vigenere or Zigzag in the same pack instead - they actually work.

Install is the usual ComfyUI story: ComfyUI Manager → search "ComfyUI ARG Toolkit" → install → restart, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/AzelusLightvale/ComfyUI-ARG-Toolkit
# restart ComfyUI

The pack is GPLv3 and one-author (AzelusLightvale), and its README is refreshingly honest that it started as an amateur project with tests covering only common cases - which is exactly the kind of caveat you should read twice before relying on a specific cipher node. The full pack pulls in secretpy, cryptography, stegano, invisible-watermark, and reedsolo, and the watermark dependency drags torch and opencv along with it, so first load is slow even if the node itself is tiny.