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Paper Enigma Machine

Tom 4 744
July 07 2005
1
One of the more interesting application areas of Maple is in the area of cryptography. A symbolic system's algebraic and integer facilities are great tools in exploring or developing ciphers. Today, I was chatting with a colleague of mine on the topic of ancient computers and at one point, I had expressed my desire to find a replica Enigma machine ... I was promptly introduced to ... http://mckoss.com/Crypto/Enigma.htm Paper Enigma Machine As an engineer by background, the math of cryptography always alluded me. Ironically, I worked for a crypto company for a couple of years in a non-technical capacity and generally found the approaches to crypto math to be fundamentally different from the way math is perceived in engineering. In the applied sciences, math is typically a modeling tool. Differential equations, probability and statistics, linear algebra ... everything was geared towards representing the behavior of something of interest. That was my worldview developed over 14 years in academic engineering. When I arrived at the crypto company I was flabbergasted to find "engineers" who work with math directly as an end in itself and not a means to an end. That seeming subtle change in perspective was enough for me to not really "get" the math. In modeling math, you always have flexibility ... you can choose to ignore this, or linearize that, etc. In crypto, it must be exact ... sort of like the difference between cooking and baking ... that's another story. One of the reasons why tools like Maple has been a Godsend to me is that it allows some ability to deal with different mathematics with some level of confidence and hopefully competence. It still didn't help me too much with elliptic curve cryptography but occasionally, I can view a worksheet on the topic and get some inkling as to the meaning. Maybe someday ... T4.

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