Furthermore, the German navy had a more complicated method of encoding than either the army or air force. If the Allied codebreakers deciphered the settings, their decryption would be useless weeks later. Each month had its own settings, printed on code sheets in soluble ink that easily dissolved in water. (The messages were transmitted over radio via Morse code). In order for the Enigma code to work for the Germans, each operator-sender and receiver-had to have exactly the same settings on their rotors and plugboards. Cryptanalysts initially discovered that they could decipher ordinary words and phrases (like “Heil Hitler”) in the Enigma messages by matching them up with strings of random letters that never repeated.īut this was not enough. But as Grime shows above, Turing is one of the real heroes of the Enigma code story. (More sadly, he was disgraced by the country he served, which put him on trial for his sexuality and humiliated him to the point of suicide). Sadly, Turing is missing from Enigma the film. What was it, you ask? Amazingly, as you will learn above, the very thing that made the Enigma nearly impossible to break, its ability to encode messages without ever repeating a letter, also made the code decipherable. Otherwise, no novel, no movie, no drama (and maybe no victory?). Of course, the Enigma Machine had to have a fatal flaw. There’s a little more to the machine than that, but Dr. In the German military machines, the total number of possible combinations for message encryptions comes to a staggering figure in the quadrillions. This allowed the coding coming through the rotors to be resequenced for an extra level of scrambling. But the German military machines had an extra layer of encoding: at the front of their machines was a “plugboard,” something like a small switchboard. Now at this point, the machine was nothing more than what was available to any bank or business wishing to transmit trade secrets. The machine was quite complicated for its time it works by sending the characters typed by the keys through a series of circuits-first through three rotors like those on a combination bike lock, but each with 26 places instead of ten. Oh, but it’s clever, you see, because the Enigma machine (the one above belongs to science writer Simon Singh) translates ordinary messages into code through an ingenious method by which no letter in the code ever repeats, making it almost impossible to decode in the ordinary ways. Developed by the Germans, it’s a marvelous encryption method set into a small box that when opened resembles little more than a fancy WWII-era typewriter. Grime gives us a thorough tour of the Enigma machine (Sir Mick owns one, by the way… but back to the history…).
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