Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ The Enigma Machine

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This is a lovely Notebook example of the Enigma Machine used to encode messages during the Second World War. It's written in Observable, described as the Javascript version of Jupyter Notebooks. What I really like is how it shows how a rotating physical device could be used for encryption. A lot of modern cryptography uses a similar approach, using modulo functions instead of a steel tube (think of it as doing mathematics with a clock). Here's the theory, in cartoon form. In cryptography, each rotor could be thought of as a (base 26 modulo) function, with a salt defining how far each rotor is turned after each input digit.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Nov 13, 2024 1:57 p.m.

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