VIRTUAL ENIGMA SIMULATOR SERIES

The Enigma machine was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. Many commentators say the flow of Ultra communications intelligence from the decryption of Enigma, Lorenz, and other ciphers, shortened the war substantially, and might even have altered its outcome.

VIRTUAL ENIGMA SIMULATOR SERIES

While Nazi Germany introduced a series of improvements to Enigma over the years, and these hampered decryption efforts to varying degrees, they did not prevent Poland from cracking the machine prior to the war, enabling the Allies to exploit Enigma-enciphered messages as a major source of intelligence. The receiving station has to know and use the exact settings employed by the transmitting station to successfully decrypt a message.

The security of the system depends on a set of machine settings that were generally changed daily during the war, based on secret key lists distributed in advance, and on other settings that were changed for each message. The rotor mechanism changes the electrical connections between the keys and the lights with each keypress. Entering ciphertext transforms it back into readable plaintext. If plain text is entered, the lit-up letters are the encoded ciphertext. In typical use, one person enters text on the Enigma's keyboard and another person writes down which of 26 lights above the keyboard lights up at each key press. Enigma has an electromechanical rotor mechanism that scrambles the 26 letters of the alphabet.

Virtual enigma simulator