German Enigma machine

The RotorMachine gem provides a simple Ruby implementation of the Enigma rotor encryption machine.

I wrote RotorMachine primarily as an exercise in Test-Driven Development with RSpec. It is not intended to be efficient or performant, and I wasn't striving much for idiomatic conciseness. My aims were fairly modular code and a relatively complete RSpec test suite.

Many thanks to Kevin Sylvestre, whose blog post helped me understand some aspects of the internal workings of the Enigma and how the signals flowed through the pieces of the machine.


Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rotor_machine'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install rotor_machine


The RotorMachine::Machine class serves as the entrypoint and orchestrator for an Enigma machine.

Components of an Enigma machine

The Enigma machine, as represented by the RotorMachine module, consists of the following components:

  • One or more rotors, which perform the transposition ciphering and also rotate to produce a polyalphabetic (rather than simple substitution) cipher.

  • A reflector, which performs a simple symmetric substitution of letters

  • A plugboard, which allows pairs of letters to be transposed on a per-message basis.

On an actual Enigma machine, these components are all electromechanical, and the Enigma also included a keyboard, a grid of lights to show the results, and in some cases a printer. Since this is a simulated Enigma, obviously, no keyboard/printer are supplied here. In this simulation, the Machine class serves to encapsulate all of these components.

The polyalphabetic encryption of the Enigma comes from the fact that the rotors are linked (mechanically in a real Enigma) so that they rotate one or more "steps" after each character, changing the signal paths and transpositions. This means that a sequence of the same plaintext character will encipher to different ciphertext characters.

The rotors are designed to advance such that each time a rotor completes a full revolution, it will advance the rotor to its left once. The rotors allow you to configure how many positions they advance when they do. So, assuming all rotors are advancing one position at a time, if the rotors have position "AAZ", their state after the next character is typed will be "ABA".

To learn much more about the inner workings of actual Enigma machines, visit Enigma Machine (Wikipedia).

The Signal Path of Letters

Here's a visual depiction of the signal path of a single character through a (physical) Enigma machine:

Enigma signal path

As you can see, the electrical signal from a keypress is routed through the plugboard, then through each of the rotors in sequence from left to right. The signal then passes through the reflector (where it is transposed again), then back through the rotors in reverse order, and finally back through the plugboard a second time before being displayed on the light grid and/or printer.

The result of the machine's signal path being a loop is that encryption and decryption are the same operation. That is to say, if you set the rotors and plugboard, and then type your plaintext into the machine, you'll get a string of ciphertext. If you then reset the machine to its initial state and type the ciphertext characters into the machine, you'll produce your original plaintext.

One consequence of the Enigma's design is that a plaintext letter will never encipher to itself. The Allies were able to exploit this property to help break the Enigma's encryption during World War II.


To use the RotorMachine Enigma machine, you need to perform the following steps:

  1. Create a new RotorMachine::Machine object.
  2. Add one or more RotorMachine::Rotors to the rotors array.
  3. Set the reflector to an instance of the RotorMachine::Reflector class.
  4. Make any desired connections in the Plugboard.
  5. Optionally, set the rotor positions with #set_rotors.

You're now ready to encipher and decipher your text using the #encipher method to encode/decode, and #set_rotors to reset the machine state.

The #default_machine and #empty_machine class methods are shortcut factory methods whcih set up, respectively, a fully configured machine with a default set of rotors and reflector, and an empty machine with no rotors or reflector.

You can also create a new RotorMachine::Machine (or its various parts) using the RotorMachine::Factory methods, as shown in the second example.


require 'rotor_machine'

machine = RotorMachine::Machine.empty_machine

machine.rotors <<, "A", 1)
machine.rotors <<, "A", 1)
machine.rotors <<, "A", 1)
machine.reflector =

machine.plugboard.connect("A", "M") 
machine.plugboard.connect("Q", "K")

plaintext = "This is a super secret message".upcase
ciphertext = machine.encipher(plaintext)      # => "MYGMS ZLTWS AAIDD VTGOC RFKFO"

new_plaintext = machine.encipher(ciphertext)  # => "THISI SASUP ERSEC RETME SSAGE"

Example - Simplified Setup Using the Factory

require 'rotor_machine'

machine = RotorMachine::Factory.build_machine(
  rotors: [:ROTOR_I, :ROTOR_II, :ROTOR_III],
  reflector: :REFLECTOR_A,
  connections: {"A" => "M", "Q" => "K" }

plaintext = "This is a super secret message".upcase



The classes in lib/rotor_machine/ all contain documentation that pretty exhaustively describe their operation. The RSpec tests in the spec/ directory are also instructive for how the library works and how to use it.





This gem depends on the tcravit_ruby_lib gem, which provides Rake tasks to update the version number. You can use the bundle exec rake version:bump:build, bundle exec version:bump:minor and bundle exec rake version:bump:major tasks to increment the parts of the version number. (These tasks rewrite the file lib/rotor_machine/version.rb. After using them, you'll need to run a git add lib/rotor_machine/version.rb and git commit -m "version bump".


Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at []. Pull requests for code changes should include RSpec tests for the new/changed features. Pull requests for documentation and other updates are also welcome.

This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct. Contributions from people who identify as women, BIPOC folx, LGBT folx, and members of other marginalized communities are especially welcomed.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the RotorMachine project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.


The gem is available as open source under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license.

Image Credits