The Enigma Machine
Jeremy Ashkenas,
Observable,
Sept 03, 2019
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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