Now set up the rotors, rings, reflector and plugs of The Enigma Machine with reference to the Key Guide below. If you wish to encode numbers in your message, you must spell them out. Pad out the last set of boxes with X's so your message is a multiple of 4 characters in length.
#Enigma simulator and designer help crack#
(It's usual in cryptography to break messages up into blocks of 4 or 5 characters to hide the clues that word lengths might give to someone trying to crack the message.) The Enigma machine didn't encode spaces (nor punctuation characters), so either leave out the spaces in your message or replace them with X's. Enter your original message in the boxes marked 'plaintext'. Use photocopies of the Coding Sheet to encode your messages. This proved to be the Enigma's Achilles' Heel. One further consequence of the design was that a letter would never encode to itself. If encoded 'ciphertext' were passed through the machine again, the result would be the original message or 'plaintext' (provided of course that the machine was set up in the same way). Consequently encoding and decoding were the same process, they were reversible. The reciprocal nature of the design meant that if the letter A were encoded into, for example, a B at some point in a message, then a B would be encoded into an A at the same point. It took some of the best mathematical brains in Europe to beat it, and doing so was the spur that led to the development of modern electronic computers. It was this fact that made the Enigma so difficult to defeat. (If this weren't the case it would have been almost trivial to crack an Enigma message.) Effectively each letter in a message was encoded using its own unique code. This meant that the same letter of the alphabet would be encoded to a different letter each time it was used in a message.
It was the operator's job to write down which lamps lit up.Īs keys were pressed the rotors would also rotate. It was considered therefore to be a very secure method of encrypting messages (it was thought unbreakable in fact though this proved not to be the case).Īs each key on the keyboard was pressed, one of the lamps would light up (obviously not the same letter that had been pressed). The cumulative effect of rotating rotors, rings, reflector and plugs meant that the number of possible different configurations of the machine was absolutely enormous. Its effect was an additional swapping of pairs of letters and hence added a further level of scrambling to the encryption process. On the front of the cabinet was the plug board, which consisted of a set of 26 sockets into which wires with plugs at both ends could be inserted. The initial positions of the rotors could also be set by the operator, according to which letters on their rims showed through a window in the machine. The ring for each rotor could be set by the operator in any one of 26 possible positions (A to Z). The rotors had adjustable rings which could be turned with respect to the inner core. The operator could also select which reflector to use (2 were available).
The cabinet contained a battery, and when a key was pressed, electric current would flow from the keyboard through each of the three rotors in turn, through a reflector, then back through the rotors, and finally through one of the lamps making it light up.Ī number of different rotors were available (8 in this case) and the operator would choose which rotors to use and the order in which to use them. The rotors were furnished with electrical contacts and buried inside were wires that connected the contacts on one side to those on the other in a scrambled order. At the top of the machine was a slot into which three wheels or rotors could be fitted onto a shaft. The Enigma Machine consisted of a wooden cabinet enclosing a typewriter keyboard and a set of 26 lamps (one for each letter of the alphabet).
#Enigma simulator and designer help how to#
Each of the rotors has a selectable ring position, as well as a start position, and a plug board is also supported.īefore explaining how to use The Enigma Machine it would be useful to describe the physical construction of a real Enigma machine, and explain what rotors, reflector, plug board etc. Other Enigmas of the time used more rotors and had extra reflectors available. This particular Enigma model utilised 3 rotors (selected from a total of 8), and had a choice of 2 reflectors. The Enigma Machine is an accurate simulation of the M3 Enigma cipher machine used by the German Navy during the Second World War.
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