HC-9

An HC-9 on display at Bletchley Park.

The HC-9 was a mechanical cipher device manufactured by Swedish company AB Transvertex. The HC-9 was designed after World War II and likely remained in use up to the 1970s. The machine was used for low-level communications.

Operation

The HC-9 made use of punched cards instead of the pin-wheel mechanisms of other machines (for example, the Hagelin M-209).

External links

• Photograph of an HC-9
• Another HC-9 photograph with a description
• A description of the machine and a simulator in QBASIC
• Discussion of the machine's operation

References

• Cipher A. Deavours and Louis Kruh, The Swedish HC-9 Ciphering Machine, Cryptologia, Vol. 13(3), July 1989, pp. 251–265
• Cipher A. Deavours and Louis Kruh, The Swedish HC-9 Ciphering Machine Challenge, Cryptologia, Vol. 14(2), April 1990, pp. 139–144
• H. P. Greenough, Cryptanalysis of the Swedish HC-9: A Known-Plaintext Approach, Cryptologia, 1997, 21(4), pp353–367.