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Enigma Cipher
Introduction
The Enigma cipher was a field cipher used by the Germans during World War II. The Enigma is
one of the better known historical encryption machines, and it actually refers to a range of
similar cipher machines. The first Enigma machine was invented by a German engineer named
Arthur Scherbius at the end of the first world war.[1] It was used commercially from the early
1920s on, and was also adopted by the military and governmental services of a number of
nations — most famously by Nazi Germany before and during World War II.[2] A variety of
different models of Enigma were produced, but the German military model, the Wehrmacht
Enigma, is the version most commonly discussed.

If you would like to encrypt some of your own Enigma messages, have a look at the javascript
example.

The Algorithm
This section will talk about the Enigma I aka Wehrmacht Enigma, other variants are similar in
operation. The 'key' for the enigma consists of several elements:

1. The rotors and their order

2. The rotor start positions
3. The ringstellung, or ring settings
4. Steckerverbindungen, or plug board settings

For information on the procedures used by the Germans during WW2 when sending Engima
messages, including how the indicators were set, see this description.
The Rotors
Assume that our rotors are I,II,III moving from left to right, and we are trying to encipher the
letter 'A'. We will assume for now that as the letter 'A' is enciphered each rotor is in its start
position ('AAA'). Since our rotors are I,II,III moving from left to right, the character A will first go
through rotor III. Each rotor applies a simple substitution operation. The substitution table for
rotor III can be seen below.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

BDFHJLCPRTXVZNYEIWGAKMUSQO

B is replaced with D, C is replaced with F etc. So after the letter 'A' goes through the rotor, it
comes out as a 'B'. The letter 'B' is now input through rotor II, where it is replaced by 'J' etc. This
is best depicted using a table (for a full description of the rotor wirings for each rotor, see this
wikipedia page):
III II I Reflector inv(I) inv(II) inv(III)

A -> B B -> J J -> Z Z -> T T -> L L -> K K -> U

After the letter goes through rotors III,II,I it then hits the reflector and undergoes another
simple substitution. After coming out of the reflector, the letter is sent back through the rotors
in the reverse direction (this means the inverse substitution is applied). We can see from the
table that after the enciphered letter comes back out rotor III at the end, we are left with the
letter U. One important step that I have not yet mentioned is the fact that the rotors increment
before each letter is enciphered. If the rotor start positions are 'FEQ', then they will first be
incremented to 'FER' before the first letter is enciphered.

Incrementing The Rotors

A common mistake when implementing the enigma is assuming the rotors act as a standard
odometer, there are however a few key differences. Each rotor has a notch which causes the
rotor to its left to step. Rotor I causes the next rotor to step on transition from Q to R, rotor II
on the transition E to F etc. Rotors I through V are used in the Wermacht enigma, later more
rotors were added which had two notches.

I II III IV V VI VII VIII

Q E V J Z Z,M Z,M Z,M

There is one extra confounding detail, that of 'double stepping'. When a rotor steps, it also
causes the rotor to its right to step. This is not noticed when the second rotor steps, since the
first rotor steps every key press. However, when the 3rd (left most) rotor steps, it causes the
second rotor to step also. This means the machines period is not 26x26x26, but only
26x25x26.

The Ringstellung
The Ringstellung (ring settings) are generally provided as a 3 letter string e.g. 'FAM' (or
alternatively as numbers between 1 and 26, representing the letters). In the previous discussion
I have assumed that each rotor's simple substitution cipher was fixed. The ringstellung provide
the capability of shifting the substitution cipher as follows. With a ring setting of 'A' (or 1), rotor
I's substitution looks like this:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

EKMFLGDQVZNTOWYHXUSPAIBRCJ

With a ring setting of 'B' (or 2), rotor I's substitution looks like this:

ZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY

EKMFLGDQVZNTOWYHXUSPAIBRCJ

The Steckerverbindungen
The steckerverbindungen (plugboard) is an added layer of security which consists of 13 wires
which plug into into sockets on the front of the enigma machine. Each wire connects 2 letters
e.g. P to O. These pairings are specified as part of the key material. When a letter is typed,
before it goes into the first rotor, it undergoes the substitution according to the plugboard,
then after the letter comes out it is put through the plugboard substitution again before being
output. An example plugboard setting is as follows: PO ML IU KJ NH YT GB VF RE AC (This
means P and O are swapped, M and L are swapped etc.).

If we use the example above where the letter 'A' was encrypted with rotors I, II and III with the
start positions AAA, we had the letter A encrypted as a U. If we now take into account the
plugboard, using the plugboard settings in the previous paragraph, the 'A' is first translated to
a 'C' before encipherment. Encipherment continues as usual, this time the 'C' is output as a 'J'.
This letter is then routed through the plugboard again to be substituted with 'K'. So now we
have an 'A' being enciphered as a 'K' with the plugboard in use. The plugboard significantly
increases the strength of the enigma cipher as a whole, more than adding another rotor could.
Javascript Example
Plaintext

key settings:

ring settings:

Rotors:

Plug board settings:

Ciphertext

Other Implementations
To encipher your own messages in python, you can use the pycipher module. To install it,
use pip install pycipher. To encipher messages with the Enigma cipher (or another cipher,

see here for documentation), see the example here.

Cryptanalysis
For some code to automatically breaking Enigma messages see Cryptanalysis of Enigma.
Much work has gone into breaking Enigma, some methods such as rodding and buttoning up were

used during the second world war, but require 'cribs', or known pieces of plaintext. These
methods are discussed on the wikipedia page.
More modern approaches include Jim Gillogly's paper 'Ciphertext only Cryptanalysis of the Enigma'. A
followup letter correcting some mistakes in the paper can be found here. Another paper that
builds on Jim Gillogly's paper is 'Applying Statistical Language Recognition Techniques in the Ciphertext
only Cryptanalysis of Enigma' by Heidi Williams. Another interesting resource is The Cryptographic
Mathematics of Enigma.

References
[1] Wikipedia has a good description of the encryption/decryption process, history and

cryptanalysis of this algorithm

[2] Kahn, D (1973) The CodeBreakers. Macmillan: New York
[3] Singh, Simon (2000). The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum
Cryptography. ISBN 0-385-49532-3.
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http://practicalcryptography.com/ciphers/columnar-transposition-cipher/

Columnar Transposition Cipher

Introduction
The columnar transposition cipher is a fairly simple, easy to implement cipher. It is a
transposition cipher that follows a simple rule for mixing up the characters in the plaintext to
form the ciphertext.

Although weak on its own, it can be combined with other ciphers, such as a substitution cipher,
the combination of which can be more difficult to break than either cipher on it's own.
The ADFGVX cipheruses a columnar transposition to greatly improve its security.

Example
The key for the columnar transposition cipher is a keyword e.g. GERMAN. The row length that is

used is the same as the length of the keyword. To encrypt a piece of text, e.g.
defend the east wall of the castle

we write it out in a special way in a number of rows (the keyword here is GERMAN):
GERMAN
d e f e n d
t h e e a s
t w a l l o
f t h e c a
s t l e x x

In the above example, the plaintext has been padded so that it neatly fits in a rectangle. This is
known as a regular columnar transposition. An irregular columnar transposition leaves these
characters blank, though this makes decryption slightly more difficult. The columns are now
reordered such that the letters in the key word are ordered alphabetically.

AEGMNR
n e d e d f
a h t e s e
l w t l o a
c t f e a h
x t s e x l

The ciphertext is read off along the columns:

nalcxehwttdttfseeleedsoaxfeahl

JavaScript Example of the Columnar

Transposition Cipher
This is a JavaScript implementation of the Columnar Transposition Cipher. This implementation
pads the plaintext so that its length is a multiple of the key length.

Plaintext