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Show HN: I wrote an Enigma machine emulator for the Web

enigma.lh.mk

83 pointslubeskih21 comments

This is very clever. But I think you would benefit from testing it with real users. I spend a minute clicking around and nothing seemed to work - then I noticed the low contrast text telling me to configure things.

So I configured them and it still didn't work. Turns out the "lock" setting was now hidden and I had to scroll down.

Once I got that done, it worked very well.

Thank you for the feedback! I should probably work on that... I agree that it's confusing.

Agreed on this, played around dragging things around for a couple minutes and still couldn't get it to do anything.

Maybe pre-configure some default settings so it works immediately upon load. Or perhaps a short video showing its use.

I would recommend setting defaults (probably first three rotors set at the beginning) and possibly not have the locking mechanism in place?

Just mentioning this:

https://observablehq.com/@tmcw/enigma-machine

Phenomenal! Thank you for this link -- such a lucid demonstration of how it works!

History/math question: I understand that the wiring in the wheels is such that the electricity is sent through the wheels then looped back through. My question is: were the wheels completely random or did they have to be specifically designed to do that?

I don't completely understand your question but I will try to answer it.

The wheels were specifically designed to do that. The internal wiring of the wheels was random, but known. For example, every "Rotor I" that exists would have A wired to E, B wired K, C wired to some other letter on the other side etc... But then "Rotor II" would have A pointing to, let's say, M, B to L ..

And yes, they were specifically designed to do that, the whole point of it was for the electrical current to travel randomly and take an unique path throughout the rotors on each key-press.

Check out this more detailed article about the rotor wiring: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/enigma/wiring.htm

Not sure if this answers your question. I'd be happy to clear out any confusions if you're more specific. :)

I'm probably completely wrong, but the wiring of the rotors makes me vaguely think of S-Boxes in modern algorithms. Not sure if the comparison holds to scrutiny however.

Each rotor implements a permutation of its input terminals. So maybe more like a p-box, but the difference is significant (only two wires in use at a any time, and one is in "reverse") so probably just thinking of it as a permutation is better.

Thanks for the response. I love the info provided. I guess my real question is this: if I wired a completely random wheel (of course making two for sender and receiver) and chucked it into an Enigma machine, would it work as intended, break some prescribed rule of the encryption, or just completely destroy the machine?

Interesting easter egg on the main page:

http://lh.mk --> views source

    <!-- who.lh.mk for the curious ones -->

http://who.lh.mk

Good stuff, Drag'n'drop is not working on Firefox btw.

Hmm.. Not sure what is causing your problem. I was testing the software on Firefox (69.0) while writing it and it works just fine. Maybe you're blocking JS or something?

I would appreciate if you could open a more detailed issue on the GitHub repository at: https://github.com/lubeskih/enigma-emulator.

Thank you!

Work for me on Firefox 69.0

Also works for me on Firefox 68.

This is awesome! It's always great to preserve history.

Why is there a stript blocking mobile browsers

It's just an alert telling you that the emulator is not supported on mobile devices.

Why does it take you to google.com instead of the page you came from?

That's a good point. Noted.

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