Enigma Crypter

Enigma Crypter is a lightweight program developed as the software correspondent of the famous German Enigma encryption machine used during the Second World War.

It's fairly difficult to actually consider a modern purpose for the Enigma Crypter since it's the version of an actual computer-styled machine that was built to encrypt military messages. That's why buttons, knobs, and rotors of the actual analog machine are now turned into virtual buttons and drop-down menus.

The overall layout is pretty simple and emulates the actual German vintage control panel with all its details into English. This is, however, the initial version of Enigma, so it can actually decrypt German war messages only from the beginning of the war. Later modifications of the device are not yet represented in this app.

Users can choose between three sets of scramblers by altering the turning positions and orders, while also selecting the connection board.

Enigma is not known to be a user-friendly device, not by a wide margin. In fact, it took one of the fathers of modern computer science, Alan Turing, years to completely decipher the technique behind the Enigma mechanisms.

Users can write a text in the 'Input Text' panel and click on 'Cipher/Decipher' button. If the text is written into plain English, the result in the 'Output Text' comes out as encrypted, but if users introduce ciphered text in the input area, a decrypted version of that text is shown.

The tool allows the algorithms to run based on your computer processor's speed. You can change that to more historical speeds of 2 characters per second, but it's useful only if you're playing a World War II re-enactment scenario.

The German Enigma machine was notorious during the war, but no other German military army used it more effectively than the Kriegsmarine, or the German Navy, that had much more advanced indicator algorithms compared to the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe encoding procedures.

The Enigma Crypter is a great app if you really plan on sending encrypted messages to your friends using the standard Enigma encryption sequences. It can be useful mostly for fun or historical reenactment scenarios, but not much else.