What was the Enigma machine?

The Enigma machine was a mechanical device used to coded and decode secret messages. During World War II, the German army was used by the machine mystery to communicate with soldiers in the field, warships and submarines. Allied cryptologists working under Codename Ultra have successfully burst most Enigma Ciphers; This gave the Allies an important source of intelligence for war efforts.

The Enigma machine itself was mechanical and looked similar to a typewriter. Every time the key was pressed, the electronic signal passed through a series of rotating mixing wheels, through a socket and then back in a different direction. Because each round could turn to change the signal path, a huge range of different keys may have been perhaps and the wheels could simply be turned every time a new key was needed. The wheels were arranged to turn the key every time the key was pressed, ensuring that the mystery against attacks on the frequency of letters; The initial position has also been changed, often several times a day.

Theoretically, Enigma was supposed to be safe against any type of brutal force attack, because there were too many ciphers options to try them all one by one. Later versions of Enigma, such as four-member models used by German U-juns, even further increased the number of combinations. Yet, captured code documents and a human error often gave cryptographs on top and the Polish army decoded secret German communication as early as 1932.

Successful interruption of the mysterious code required to find out regularity or known factors to reduce a huge number of possible ciphers. Several simple texts, such as "Heil Hitler", often appeared in German news; This gave important traces to cryptanalysts who could search the encrypted message and find out where such a sentence could appear. The Germans also handed over simple, easily analyzed the six -point header at the beginning of the news such as "einein" to provide the rest of the messagecipher wheels. When the space of possible code keys has ever become too large, several primitive computers were built to automatically calculate thousands of options; This happened by some of the first works carried out to calculate the general purpose.