Enigma (2024)

FAQs

How many possible combinations did Enigma have? ›

Combining three rotors from a set of five, each of the 3 rotor settings with 26 positions, and the plugboard with ten pairs of letters connected, the military Enigma has 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 different settings (nearly 159 quintillion or about 67 bits).

Until the release of the Oscar-nominated film The Imitation Game in 2014, the name 'Alan Turing' was not very widely known. But Turing's work during the Second World War was crucial.

To decrypt a message, one needs not only an Enigma machine, but also the knowledge of the starting state, i.e. at which positions the wheels were when the text was typed in. To decrypt the message, the machine must be set to the same starting state, and the cipher text is entered. Output is the plain text.

The actual revelation for the majority of Germans did not come until the 1970s when the Ultra documents were finally de-classified. The long delay in revealing them was the result of many Warsaw pact countries relying on Enigma based technologies through the 1950s and 1960s.

So to try all possibilities, it'll take us 150 trillion divided by 30, which is 5 trillion seconds: about 160,000 years! Not that it matters much, but the encryption key changes every 24 hours, so brute forcing this wasn't an option back then and isn't an option today!

Joan Clarke

Though she did not personally seek the spotlight, her important role in the Enigma project that decrypted Nazi Germany's secret communications earned her awards and citations, such as appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), in 1946.

Due to the problems of counterfactual history, it is hard to estimate the precise effect Ultra intelligence had on the war. However, official war historian Harry Hinsley estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14 million lives.

Being able to read these messages proved to be a vital tool that arguably altered the course of the war. Without it, history might have taken a very different shape. One of the first theatres in which the cracking of Enigma had an impact was the battle of the Atlantic, which raged throughout the war in Europe.

The machine was designed in 1939; at that time, Turing was 27 years old. Here's a replica.

One of the simplest types of encryption is the Shift Cipher. It provides a good introduction to encryption because it is easy to understand. The Shift Cipher is also called the "Caesar Cipher", because Julius Caesar liked to use it for his personal correspondence.

What is the hardest code to decrypt? ›

The Vigenère cipher is a symmetric polyalphabetic substitution cipher that was invented by Giovan Battista Bellaso in the 16th century. It is considered one of the most difficult historical ciphers to crack, primarily due to its polyalphabetic nature.

An Enigma machine allows for billions and billions of ways to encode a message, making it incredibly difficult for other nations to crack German codes during the war — for a time the code seemed unbreakable.

By the end of the war, some 9,000 people worked here in top secrecy in a series of huts built in the 50-acre grounds of the mansion. Their job was to supply Turing and the codebreakers with encrypted radio messages hacked from German and Japanese and Italian radio communications all over the world.

After the war Turing worked on the design of the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) at the National Physical Laboratory, which many people see as the forerunner to the modern computer.

In January 2016, at the age of 95, Lieutenant Commander David Balme died a hero. Credited with capturing the top-secret Enigma machine that turned the tide of the deadliest war ever fought and thus shortening it by two years, he helped save hundreds of thousands of lives across the world.

The complexity of the Enigma machine

The basic 3-rotor Enigma has 26x26x26 = 17,576 possible rotor states for each of 6 wheel orders giving 6x17,576 = 105,456 machine states. For each of these the plugboard (with ten pairs of letters connected) can be in 150,738,274,937,250 possible states.

Enigma was so sophisticated it amounted to what's now called a 76-bit encryption key. One example of how complex it was: typing the same letters together, like "H-H" (for Heil Hitler") could result in two different letters, like "L-N." That type of complexity made the machines impossible to break by hand, Simpson says.

We will also assume this is an Enigma machine with three rotors. What Allied cryptanalysts had to determine was which three of the five possible discs were chosen, and in which order they were placed into the machine. This is simply 5 × 4 × 3 = 60 possible combinations which needed to be checked.

The Enigma code breaking process began long before the war broke out. The combined efforts of some of the most gifted mathematical minds helped crack the enigma. Through innovations discovered by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, a logic-based device was created to help decipher the Enigma.