The Enigma Cipher Machine
Possibly the most well known of all cipher machines is the German Enigma. It became the workhorse of the German military services, used to encrypt tens of thousands of tactical messages throughout World War II. The number of mathematical permutations for every keystroke is astronomical. However, the Enigma is not famous for its outstanding security, but rather for its insecurities. Allied forces were able to read most of the Enigma encrypted messages throughout most of the war as a result of the tireless effort of many Allied cryptologists.
- Codes in History
- Cryptography
Timeline:
http://www.jproc.ca/crypto/crypto_hist.html
- From Commerical to Military Use
- Rotors
- Reflector
- Stepping Mechanism
- Accessories
- Security Properties
"...the First World War was the chemists' war, ...the Second World War was the physicists' war, ...the Third World War would be the mathematicians' war..."
- Simon Singh
- Allies and Deciphering
- Bletchley Park
- Enigma & the German Navy
- Alan Turing
- Colossus
- Hackers
- Quantum Cryptography
As cipher machines and computers have taken on increasingly important roles in history, considerable interest has developed in collecting and studying these early technological innovations.
Concluding Key Points:
- The "work" the enigma cipher machine created for codebreakers - Just as one side invented an ingenious new way to encipher its messages, so would its enemies discover alternative clever ways of cracking that code. The result has been that codes and ciphers have become more and more complex and increasingly difficult to crack over time - throughout history an intellectual battle has raged between code makers and code breakers.
The battle of wits was never keener than during the Second World War, when the Germans used the famous Enigma machine - which they believed unbreakable - to encode messages, and the Allies worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the code.
Historical coverage of the cipher enigma machine is quite interesting: the majority of the articles, documents, museums, etc. are dedicated to the work of codebreaking. The machine itself was heralded as unbreakable, yet coverage of this artifact is mainly focused on the "work the enigma created" for the Allies.
- Man vs. Machine - technology versus brain power
1.
Breaking enigma by hand: required a tremendous manpower and time to mathematically figure out how Enigma worked and decrypt messages
2.
Breaking enigma the hard way: several times the Allies resorted to stealing the codebooks. They laid traps for German ships and submarines, and raided remote bases, hoping to locate cipher materials that would give them the Enigma settings for a month or two.
3.
Breaking enigma by machine: at Bletchley Park, the mathematician Alan Turing and others built complex “bombes” to help break Enigma.
The bombes could try out possible solutions many times faster than a person could. By the end of the war, the British and Americans had hundreds of these machines, as well as the Colossus working around the clock decoding coded messages.
- "The Black Box" - the enigma cipher machine can be seen as a black box in the sense that there was an aura of secrecy around the enigma cipher machine. The Allied forces dedicated tremendous amounts of time, energy, and effort to try and unlock the mysteries of the German enigma cipher machine - because it was seen as a clue that could help them break the German messages. However, even at times when the Allied forces had stolen a German enigma machine, the machine itself could not decrypt the coded messages for them - it helped, but alone it was not the complete solution.
- "The Secret War" - just as the German enigma machine was highly secret, the work of the Allies to intercept and decode the German messages was highly secret as well. Bletchley Park, known as Station X, was the largest code-breaking establishment the world had ever seen, where in hastily constructed huts brilliant minds worked to crack German codes. The full story would not emerge for at least 30 years after the war had ended. In the history of warfare, never before had one site known so many of the enemy's secrets.
- How artifacts are connected - From typewriter & Morse Code -> Enigma Machine -> Computer
- The Unbreakable Machine - The Germans thought it to be unbreakable, and not without good reason. Enigma's complexity was bewildering. The odds against anyone who did not know the settings being able to break Enigma were a staggering 150 million million million to one. And yet, human factors largely influenced the effectiveness of the enigma cipher machine. Codebreakers were able to capitalize on the foolish mistakes of German operators. Thus, a large part of the "success" of the German enigma cipher machine was dependent upon the operator's use of the machine; one could possibly argue that the main weakness of the enigma machine was the German military leader's unmoving faith that the code could not be cracked.
- "The World is to Be Decoded" - a notion that if you just have the "right" key, you can unlock all the secrets, and everything would fall together
- Ordinary Citizens made an impact in the war effort. One often associates war with force, soldiers, weaponry, etc., however, the individuals that worked at Bletchley Park came from all walks of life: anthropologists, paleontologists, mathematicians, crossword fanatics, etc. And their collaborative, as well as individual efforts (such as Alan Turing) made a major impact on how WWII unfolded.
"In all of the far-flung operations of our own armed forces - on land and sea and in the air - the final job, the toughest job, has been performed by the average, easy-going, hard-fighting young American, who carries the weight of battle on his own shoulders. It is to him that we and all future generations of Americans must pay grateful tribute." (Franklin D. Roosevelt)
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." (Sir Winston Churchill)
- Artifacts can make us just as people make artifacts - with the emergence of the enigma cipher machine a whole new set of players and heroes emerged in WWII. The notorious, yet in its day covert operations that took place at Bletchley Park, the efforts of the codebreakers that worked day and night to intercept and break the enigma's encrypted messages, and much much more. Further down the road the machines that were invented to break the encrypted messages (Bombe and Colossus) would lead to a revolutionary artifact in and of itself - the modern-day computer.
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