the enigma machine was invented in 1918 by arthur scherbius in berlin, it was, at the time a great way to encode messages, well, until it got beat. but now you can make one out of paper.
is there anything pdfs can’t do?
this machine is compatible with the original 3-rotor german enigma used during world war ii. for simplicity it omits the “ring settings” and plug board, but the primary workings of the machine are captured in this model. great as an educational tool, or just for fun!
once youve got your enigma machine working, give it a try on the geek challenges http://www.osix.net
one of the levels requires you to do an enigma decoding.
Or, if you think you’re hot decoding stuff, give my own code a wack. If you manage to decode it, there’s a prize! http://www.xenobyte.net/contest.html
And if you prefer hardware to paper :) take a look at the Enigma-E (the Electronic Enigma device)
http://www.xat.nl/enigma-e/
Another paper+CD-case one-rotor Enigma machine can be found at https://secure.bletchleypark.org.uk/newshop/shopcategory.asp?productcode=ENIG028
(who also sell the electronic Enigma-E).
There’s a detailed review on http://home.egge.net/~savory/pocket_enigma.htm
A nice enigma machine applet – http://russells.freeshell.org/enigma/
take a peek on these pages for an award winning Enigma sim:
http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/enigmasim.htm
Correcting Bit Rot: The link to the paper machine mentioned in this article is:
http://mckoss.pageforest.com/Crypto/Enigma.htm