GCHQ, the UK intelligence agency, is celebrating its centenary this month. As part of its celebrations, the agency has released emulators for the famous cipher machines used in World War II.
You can try your hands on the popular cipher machines like Enigma, Typex and the Bombe on CyberChef, GCHQ’s web-based educational encryption app.
Here’s the tweet from GCHQ announcing the emulators:
We’ve brought technology from our past into the present by creating emulators for Enigma, Typex and The Bombe in #CyberChef. We even tested them against the real thing! Try them out for yourself!https://t.co/OxLcQQbePa#GCHQ100 pic.twitter.com/t2ixVE6j7H
— GCHQ (@GCHQ) March 14, 2019
GCHQ has published a detailed how-to guide on GitHub. The post also provides you with information about how Enigma, Typex and the Bombe work. Enigma machines were used majorly by the German military to turn text into ciphertext and vice versa.
Alan Turing, the popular mathematician and computer scientist, developed Bombe, a device used for cracking Enigma codes and played a major role in World War II.
GCHQ isn’t the first to bring emulators of code-breaking devices. If CodeChef’s emulator looks tedious, you can try this web-based Enigma emulator from Summerside Makerspace or this Enigma Simulator desktop app by Terry Long.
Do give these online emulators from WWII a try and tell us about your experience in the comments section.
