

The signal then goes to the entrance wheel (#4) and into the rotors (#5). The circuit closes (#2) and the signal goes through the plugboard (#3), which is not connected. To see how the encryption works we’ll press a key in the figure below, let’s say “A”. At the top of the machine there are some rotors, in the photo these are hidden under the black cover. In both cases, from the bottom to the top we see a plugboard, some keys and some letters that can light up. The photo above shows an actual Enigma machine, the figure below shows a schematic overview. And Alan Turing? He was driven to suicide by the British government because of his homosexuality… How the Enigma worked It took until 2009 before the British government gave out a medal to the veterans, saying “We also served”. But it is also a dramatic story of people who were not allowed to say what they were doing for the war effort. It is a war story were human willpower is used to save people, not to make more destructive bombs. It is an inspiring story about a problem of massive complexity directly affecting the lives of thousands of people and the course of the war. National Cryptographic Museum by Austin Mills Photograph of an Enigma machine, taken in the
ENIGMA SIMULATOR CODE
After the war Churchill said the code breakers shortened the war by two years. This made it possible to read the instructions for the German U-boats and change the routes of convoys travelling from the US to the UK, saving thousands of lives. Alan Turing and others helped improve a Polish design for an electronic machine that could automate the cracking (the same Turing en passant invented the computer). Polish mathematicians found a way of cracking the code and just before the Germans invaded Poland their knowledge was transferred to the British.

Still, the Enigma was cracked… even before the war broke out. That sounds like a lot – and it is! The encryption of an internet connection is usually 16 or 32 bit. The Germans thought the machine to be unbreakable because it has 10^23 settings, in modern terms this would be called 77-bit encryption.

The sender used the machine to convert plain German into apparent gibberish and the receiver could only convert it back to plain German if the correct settings were used. Resources Background of the Enigma coding machineīefore and during the Second World War the German military communicated using the Enigma encryption machine.
