Enigma Machine

So, if someone sent you a secret message encrypted from this page, here is where you can decrypt or decipher the message. To do so, just paste the message into the text feild and provide the secret key for your message. The message will be decrypted and appear in the box below when you click the "Decrypt Message" button.

I've been reading a biography about Alan Turing, and that has got me thinking about encryption. So I decided to make a page that will generate encrypted messages, kind of like the famous German Enigma machine from World War II.

This encryption program works using the ASCII codes for characters, although I suppose today it's really the UTF-8 character set. Anyhow, the values are the same. The basic idea is that all characters--like numbers, letters, punctuation and more--are represented by a numerical value (0 to 255 because that information can be contained within one byte). For example, the character 'a' is represented by the decimal number 97 (01100001 for the binary byte). This program uses a key that you will provide--a string of a few characters--to alter the values of the characters converting them into other characters. Even the space character is changed. Decryption is carried out by running the process in reverse, but it can't be easily done without the key.

In a time of end-to-end encryption on message applications like WhatsApp, this is obviously not a very useful service to provide. But it is kind of fun. I think the best way to send a message using this page would be to copy the output of the encryption to a text document (something like Word would do fine). You could then send the message to a friend in that form. Then you could provide the person with the key by a different medium along with a link to this page, otherwise anybody who intercepted the document could read the secret message!