Hill Cipher - Mechanical Implementation

Mechanical Implementation

When operating on 2 symbols at once, a Hill cipher offers no particular advantage over Playfair or the bifid cipher, and in fact is weaker than either, and slightly more laborious to operate by pencil-and-paper. As the dimension increases, the cipher rapidly becomes infeasible for a human to operate by hand. A Hill cipher of dimension 6 was implemented mechanically. Hill and a partner were awarded a patent (U.S. Patent 1,845,947) for this device, which performed a 6 × 6 matrix multiplication modulo 26 using a system of gears and chains. Unfortunately the gearing arrangements (and thus the key) were fixed for any given machine, so triple encryption was recommended for security: a secret nonlinear step, followed by the wide diffusive step from the machine, followed by a third secret nonlinear step. Such a combination was actually very powerful for 1929, and indicates that Hill apparently understood the concepts of a meet-in-the-middle attack as well as confusion and diffusion. Unfortunately, his machine did not sell.