(Difficult) In reading about the Enigma machine, I was a little confused about the method of encryption. It obviously was not a substitution cipher, but of the cryptosystems we have studied so far, it reminded me most of a one-time pad. With that in mind it would explain the weakness of encoding multiple messages with the same key.There also seemed to be some obvious limitations on the permutations of a given message, at least when compared to substitution ciphers, vigenere ciphers, etc.
(Reflective) It was nice to read a little about disjoint cycles of permutations in the lecture. This was another topic covered in Abstract Algebra which left me wondering, "when will we ever use this?" I also found it interesting that the cycle lengths each appeared an even number of times. Does this have to do with the design of the enigma machine itself, or more to do with properties of cycles?
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