What is the Enigma machine? The Enigma machine is a electro-mechanical rotor cypher machine that was developed and utilized to shield classified commercial, diplomatic, and military messages. The Enigma machine was invented by Arthur Scherbius, a German engineer. What is cryptography? The practice and study of the techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversaries. How does the Enigma machine work? After an operator of the Enigma machine types in a message, the machine will scramble it by using three to five notched wheels, or rotors, these of which will display different letters of the alphabet. In order to decipher the message the receiver need ed to know the exact settings of these rotors. As time went on the basic machines …show more content…
What is ‘Bletchley Park’? It was Britain’s main decryption establishment located in Buckinghamshire in WW2. Codes and ciphers were decrypted there, but the most important work done there was the decryption of the Enigma machine. How did the British find out about the German Enigma? 1931 was when the potential problems that the German Enigma machine could cause create were realised by the British. This was because of a German spy who allowed his French spymasters to photograph a Enigma operating manuals. But at first no one could break the Enigma cipher. Finally the Polish were able to reconstruct an completely wired Enigma machine by 1938, a year before the outbreak of war. Who was Alan Turing? He was a British scientist and a major developer in computer science. His most well known work was his contribution to winning the war in Europe. He managed to develop a machine that helped break the Enigma code. He was born on the 7th of June, 1912 in Maida Vale, England. Who was Joan …show more content…
The ‘Bombe’ needed 12 miles of wiring and 97,000 different parts to operate properly. The prototype was made for £100,000, which is £4 million today. The machine included 36 Enigma machines. Each Enigma is assigned a pair of letters from the acquired crib text. When switched on, the 3 rotors move at a rate imitating that of the Enigma machine. While this is happening the machine is checking 17,500 possible positions. This process only stops when each of the Enigma machines think that it has found the correct pair of letters at the same time and opens up it’s electrical circuit. The ‘Bombe’ uses logic to dismiss possibilities and ultimately find out the key, But at first it comes up with multiple possible answers. Further work is needed to narrow down the correct key. But this only gavotte codebreakers par of the key. They had to use their knowledge from the ‘Bombe’ to figure out the whole of the key. Once they cracked the code they would set up an Enigma machine with the correct code for the day and reverse the code for every message