The Mexican Army Cipher Wheel

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With the Mexican Army Cipher Wheel, we have each letter mapped to a range of numeric values. These mappings are defined with a number of rings:

Ref [here]

Disk 1 has values from 01 to 26, Disk 2 from 27 to 52, Disk 3 form 53 to 78, and Disk 4 from 79 to 00 (and with four empty slots. We then use a key to define the position of the disks. If we have an “A”, we map to 01, 27, 53 or 79.

For HELLO, the letter H can be mapped to 08, 34, 60, or 86, and for E we can map to 05, 31, 57 or 83. The position of the disks are represented by four letters. With two rings, we can define a key of “a 20 27”, and where a maps to 20 on the first ring, and 27 on the second ring. For “hello”, we could get a ring and cipher of:

Plaintext:  hello
Wheel: [['20', '21', '22', '23', '24', '25', '26', '01', '02', '03', '04', '05', '06', '07', '08', '09', '10', '11', '12', '13', '14', '15', '16', '17', '18', '19'], ['27', '28', '29', '30', '31', '32', '33', '34', '35', '36', '37', '38', '39', '40', '41', '42', '43', '44', '45', '46', '47', '48', '49', '50', '51', '52']]
Key: a2027
Cipher: 0131383841
Decipher: hello

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Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE
ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

Professor of Cryptography. Serial innovator. Believer in fairness, justice & freedom. Based in Edinburgh. Old World Breaker. New World Creator. Building trust.