Enigma cipher machine? Build your own – papercraft – for security fans!

enigma machineOne of the most secret weapons of World War II: the Enigma Machine, german army cipher machine – supposedly unbreakable and uncrackable.
Luckily it wasn’t so rock-solid and war turned as we all know and was won as well as the story of all mathematicians secretly working at Bletchley Park, namely Alan Turing.

An Enigma machine is any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. Enigma was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I.
The early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries — most notably by Nazi Germany before and during World War II.
Several different Enigma models were produced, but the German military models are the ones most commonly discussed.

Today, you can build a papercraft 4-rotors Enigma machine (the Kriegsmarine version) thanks to UK information security consultants Franklin Heath Ltd.

enigma cipher machine papercraft

Just download the Enigma PDF and do some papercrafting, instructions included!

It’s a good journey into WWII maximum security – where we all come from…

enigma pdf cipher papercraft

You can read much more info in Enigma: The Battle for the Code, Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park’s code-breaking computers
and Alan Turing: The Enigma The Centenary Edition.

[Via MakeZine]

This entry was posted in History, Security and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.