CryptoSimulation Roundup

Most of these were in use in the 1940s and 1950s, and have been wonderfully reproduced by Dirk
Rijmenants. Photos of the actual hardware can be seen in the Crypto Museum site. This page doesn't
reveal information about current cryptographic systems or key settings that might have been used in
the past, and refers strictly to publicly-available information on machines that were used across many
countries and have long been decommissioned.

Perhaps one of the main reasons they were largely

declassified is they are all based on Enigma, the
workings of which are well-known and outlined in any
decent book on the subject. All these systems worked
on the same principle - the main components were
rotors with two sets of pins representing characters.
Internal wiring inside each rotor substituted each
character with another. Messages encrypted by post-
Enigma machines are unlikely to ever be decrypted
because of the unimaginable number of possible wheel
and pin settings.

The following simulations were created by D. Rijmenants back in 2006 to run on Microsoft Windows
XP, but they also run perfectly in WINE, if you're installing them on Linux. Both simulations and the
original machines themselves are works of genius, which is why I've devoted a post to these.

ATOMIX

Little is known about this system, and there isn't much information readily available on it, except that it
was used in the later years of the Cold War. Pocket-sized programmable crypto devices were in
circulation by the late 1980s, so ATOMIX was in service prior to that, perhaps as early as 1965.
As the simulation shows, the device was an electromechanical device with eight wheels, the settings
of which formed the message key. There was most likely another mechanism, hidden under the casing
to the right of the wheels, used to generate the cipher.
Enigma

This is perhaps the best known of the cipher machines, which the history of Bletchley Park and the
first ever digital computer, Colossus, was based around. Enigma was also the first cryptosystem of this
kind, and the basis for the future devices in this article.
There were several models in use up to 1945. The common model had three wheels, and was used
for general communications. Another version, used when a higher level of security was needed, had
up to eight wheels.
Usually, a codebook was issued to all the units, and from this, a new key was selected each day. The
codebook told the operators which rotors, ring settings and plug connections to use.

Each wheel had two sets of 26 pins, to represent the characters of the alphabet. The wiring inside the
wheel itself matched each pin to another pin representing a different letter. On its own, this provided a
substitution cipher system, which is easy to break, so wiring was changed on a plugboard to further
scramble the signals.
To make the code harder to break, the first wheel moved one position each time a character occurred
more than once in a message. When the first wheel completed one revolution, the second wheel
moved a position.

When a key was pressed, and electrical current passed through the wheels, and the wiring inside
them, to a reflector. The return wire from the reflector passed the current through the plugboard to one
of the lamps in the panel above the keypad. The illuminated letter on the panel was written down. The
process repeated for each letter in the message.

The receivers, with identical wheel and plugboard settings on their Enigma machines, entered the
coded message. As each letter was typed in, the deciphered letter lighted up on the panel.

Different sections of the German army also used their own characters to represent abbreviations and
punctuation, making it harder for third-parties to analyse their messages. Code words were used if
more than one character was repeated sequentially.
Hagelin BC-52
Manufactured by Hagelin Cryptos, this device was
the successor to the M-209 used for encrypting
high-level messages from the early 1950s. Some of
the M-209's features were also found in the BC-52
and variations of this system.
It was particularly secure when the key settings
were very carefully chosen.

The user selects six pinwheels from a set of 12,

each with 32 pins. Each wheel also had a different
sequence of letters and numbers. The start position
of these wheels forms the message key, which
should only be used for that message.
The printer wheel offset could also be adjusted to
further obscure the messages.

As with the other cryptosystems of this type, all communicating parties must decide on a method of
sharing the message keys, and also use identical settings on their machines.

KL-7
Based almost directly on the Enigma, the KL-7
was compromised a number of times while it
was in operation. Introduced by the NSA in
1952-1953, the KL-7 was loaned by the NSA to
NATO until 1983, when it was discovered
information about the device was passed on to
the Soviets. The NSA immediately recalled the
devices and related materials, and the KL-7 was
decommissioned.

The wiring inside each rotor was kept secret

and changed annually. After the machines were
recalled, the wiring inside the rotors, and other
parts of the machine, was removed altogether to
prevent past messages being deciphered.
Because of this, the exact workings are still
unknown. Rijmenants' KL-7 simulation is
generally accepted as the most accurate model
available.

Although it was intended to be vehicle-mounted field kit, the KL-7 was unreliable and suffered a
number of mechanical problems.
M-209

Also used as field equipment by the US Army. The M-209 worked in roughly the same way as a
typewriter, but to make the device as small and lightweight as possible, a wheel was used to select
characters instead of a keypad. Each character, after being selected, was printed onto paper tape
(stored under the casing) when the user pushed the large lever to the right of the device.

To set the device for encryption, the user switches the small tab on the left to 'C' and sets the message
key by rotating the large wheels on the front of the device.
To enter a message, the user rotates a small wheel on the left to select the character, then uses the
large tab on the right as a enter key. The encrypted text was printed onto the tape.
To decrypt a message, the small tab on the left was switched to 'D', sets the large wheels to match the
encryption key, then enters the encrypted message. The plaintext was printed on the tape.

The M-209 was also expendable. If there was risk of capture, the key settings were reset and the
machine destroyed.

Other Sources:
Dirk Rijmenants (Cipher Machines and Cryptology)
http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants
http://rijmenants.blogspot.com

Crypto Museum
http://www.cryptomuseum.com/