Project 4: Enigma

Your task in this project is to write a program that simulates the operation of the Enigma machine, which was used by the German military to encrypt messages during World War II. This guide focuses on the necessary steps you need to accomplish to complete the assignment.

As per usual, you will submit this project through GitHub Classroom, and you can find the link to accept the project and download the initial template files below.


Accept Project


You can see an online version of each milestone here to check your progress along the way, and I highly encourage you to do so!

Strategy and Tactics

As with all projects in this class, the most important advice is to start early! You have enough time with this project that you could complete one milestone per day and still finish early. Beyond that, several of the milestones require less than ten lines of new code. For those, you can almost certainly complete two or even three milestones in a day. What almost certainly will not work is if you start the day before it is due and try to finish all six milestones in a single day. It is also important to complete each milestone before moving on to the next. Most of the later milestones depend on the earlier ones, and you need to know that the earlier code is working before you can debug the code you have added on top of the existing base.

The following tips might also help you do well on this assignment:

  • Try to get into the spirit of the history. Although this project is an assignment in 2025, it may help to remember that the outcome of World War II once depended on the people solving this problem using tools that were far more primitive than the ones you have at your disposal.
  • Draw lots of diagrams. Understanding how the Enigma machine works is an exercise in visualization. A picture is often worth a thousand words here, so draw them!
  • Debug your program by seeing what values appear in the variables. When you are debugging a program, it is far more useful to figure out what your program is doing than trying to determine why it is not doing what you want. Every part of this assignment works with strings, and you can get an enormous amount of information about what your program is doing by using print to display the value of the strings you are using at interesting points.
  • Check your answers against the demonstration programs. I linked you above to a website which includes online demo programs for each milestone. Your code should generate the same results that the demo programs do.