Potential Extensions

While there are many things you could implement to elaborate on the Enigma project, most students find them a bit more difficult than on some past projects. But here are a few ideas.

• Implement other features of the Enigma machine. The German wartime Enigma was more complicated than the model presented here. In particular, the wartime machines had a stock of five rotors of which the operators could use any three in any order. The Germans also added a plugboard that swapped pairs of letters before they were fed into the rotors, and after they came out.
• Simulate the actions of the Bombe decryption machine. This assignment has you build a simulator for the German Enigma machine. Check out the extended documentation on Enigma decryption and consider implementing some of the British decoding strategies.