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X, Y & Z: The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken is a 2018 book by Dermot Turing about the Enigma machine, which was used by Nazi Germany in World War II, and about the French, British, and Polish teams that worked on decrypting messages transmitted using the Enigma cipher.
Cryptanalysis of the Enigma ciphering system enabled the western Allies in World War II to read substantial amounts of Morse-coded radio communications of the Axis powers that had been enciphered using Enigma machines.
Enigma, device used by the German military to encode strategic messages before and during World War II. The Enigma code was first broken by the Poles in the early 1930s. In 1939 the Poles turned their information over to the British, who set up the code-breaking group Ultra, under mathematician Alan M. Turing.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Enigma was a cipher device used by Nazi Germany’s military command to encode strategic messages before and during World War II.
- The number of permutations of settings available to the encoders made the Enigma code difficult to break. The operator set the machine’s rotating w...
- The Enigma machine produced encoded messages. Electrical signals from a typewriter-like keyboard were routed through a series of rotating wheels as...
- In 1932–33 Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski deduced the wiring pattern inside the wheels of Enigma, assisted by Enigma operating manuals provid...
- The Enigma code was broken through the collaboration of the French secret service, the Polish Cipher Bureau, and the British government cryptologic...
- History
- Design
- Operation
- Models
- Surviving Machines
- Derivatives
- See Also
- External Links
The Enigma machine was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. The German firm Scherbius & Ritter, co-founded by Scherbius, patented ideas for a cipher machine in 1918 and began marketing the finished product under the brand name Enigma in 1923, initially targeted at commercial markets. Early models were used commerc...
Like other rotor machines, the Enigma machine is a combination of mechanical and electrical subsystems. The mechanical subsystem consists of a keyboard; a set of rotating disks called rotors arranged adjacently along a spindle; one of various stepping components to turn at least one rotor with each key press, and a series of lamps, one for each let...
Basic operation
A German Enigma operator would be given a plaintext message to encrypt. After setting up his machine, he would type the message on the Enigma keyboard. For each letter pressed, one lamp lit indicating a different letter according to a pseudo-random substitution determined by the electrical pathways inside the machine. The letter indicated by the lamp would be recorded, typically by a second operator, as the cyphertext letter. The action of pressing a key also moved one or more rotors so that...
Details
In use, the Enigma required a list of daily key settings and auxiliary documents. In German military practice, communications were divided into separate networks, each using different settings. These communication nets were termed keys at Bletchley Park, and were assigned code names, such as Red, Chaffinch, and Shark. Each unit operating in a network was given the same settings list for its Enigma, valid for a period of time. The procedures for German Naval Enigma were more elaborate and more...
Indicator
Most of the key was kept constant for a set time period, typically a day. A different initial rotor position was used for each message, a concept similar to an initialisation vector in modern cryptography. The reason is that encrypting many messages with identical or near-identical settings (termed in cryptanalysis as being in depth), would enable an attack using a statistical procedure such as Friedman's Index of coincidence. The starting position for the rotors was transmitted just before t...
The Enigma family included multiple designs. The earliest were commercial models dating from the early 1920s. Starting in the mid-1920s, the German military began to use Enigma, making a number of security-related changes. Various nations either adopted or adapted the design for their own cipher machines. An estimated 40,000 Enigma machines were co...
The effort to break the Enigma was not disclosed until the 1970s. Since then, interest in the Enigma machine has grown. Enigmas are on public display in museums around the world, and several are in the hands of private collectors and computer history enthusiasts. The Deutsches Museum in Munich has both the three- and four-rotor German military vari...
The Enigma was influential in the field of cipher machine design, spinning off other rotor machines. Once the British discovered Enigma's principle of operation, they created the Typex rotor cipher, which the Germans believed to be unsolvable. Typex was originally derived from the Enigma patents; Typex even includes features from the patent descrip...
Bletchley Park National Code Centre Home of the British codebreakers during the Second World War Archived 9 December 2009 at the Wayback MachineHow Alan Turing cracked the Enigma Code. Turing’s work during the Second World War was crucial. Who was Turing and what did he do that was so important?
Feb 17, 2011 · In 2001, the release of the feature film Enigma sparked great interest in the tweedy world of the boffins who broke Nazi Germany's secret wartime communications codes. But not all who watched...
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In March 1941, when the German armed trawler 'Krebs' was captured off Norway complete with Enigma machines and codebooks, the German naval Enigma code could finally be read. The Allies could now discover where U-boats were hunting and direct their own ships away from danger.
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