Enigma
Historical Background
At the end of World War I, the Allies were celebrating their victory over the Nazis.
But years later the Germans had stopped backing down and World War II had started.
This required new codes to be created and cryptographers to create and crack them.
But this time the Germans had a secret weapon, the Enigma code.
Who Invented It?
In the year of 1918, Arthur Scherbius invented the Enigma code. This was a machine that could fully code a message so hard that it would take years to figure out. This was initially used to make business deals private and secure. But that was a few years before WWII started. When the German military found out about the machine it became their most valued asset. This gave the Nazis several wins and caused the Allies to panic. Even when the Allies put their best cryptographers to work, none could solve it. The Enigma was an electromechanical machine that relied on a series of rotating wheels to scramble messages into a chaotic ciphertext. There were over 100,000,000 possible combinations. When you press a letter it would light up the other letter it encrypted it to. So for example, if you pressed E it could light up to A but if you press E again it could light up P. So it wouldn’t give the same letter. It was possible to even change which path each number took. The Germans also changed the order of the wires and wheels every day which made even harder to crack.
Who Cracked the Code?
During WWII, the Allies, though specifically the British, were finding these Enigma machines in sunken U-boats along the Atlantic Ocean. They knew that this was the machine that was sending the codes to the shipmen, and that they needed to figure them out. So Alan Turing and his friends invented the “Bomb” to stimulate all the millions of calculations that the Enigma could create. During the middle of WWII, the British were intercepting the Enigma-Morse Coded messages from German headquarters to the ships, which always started with “wind speeds.” The British noticed this, intercepting more and more every day, figured out that it would always be the wind speeds first so that they could start off their calculations with that first part. In 1943-45, the British and US had many “Bomb” machines on the Atlantic side, the Germans not even knowing that they were figuring out their codes. By 1945, the “Bomb” machines figured out the German Enigma codes, and the German encrypted code time was finished. 
Flaws
The Enigma machine had a couple mechanical and personal flaws. The first was that the people who sent the messages from station to boats started with “wind speeds” every day so it was a starting point for the British. Another was that the Enigma machine couldn’t make a letter itself like making “e” to “e”. The third was that the people who operated the Enigma machines sometimes forgot to rotate the gears, making the number of combinations more and more limited.
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By;
Arjun V
Jack P
Keegan S
Josh S
Sofia B
9 comments:
Did anyone else learn the code? And, when did this war end? But, I love all the machinery to make the code!
How did the people who were intended to receive the message read what it wrote? Also, what did the last two pictures show?
I think that it is cool how the Americans found the Engima code on the U-boats in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This was probably impacting and if the Americans did not find the Engima Codes they might have lost the war. Was it easy to rewire the cords and wheels?
I found this article interesting. I think it is cool that the enigma machines were found in the boats and find it amazing that they (Enigma Machines) were still intact. But I searched it up and I found out that the Nazi's Political Party had not yet risen to power, though WW1 would become a cause of there rise to power.
You said that the Enigma machines lit up. If they were partly electronic, why were they working when they recovered them from the submarines. By the way, for people who don't know, U-boats are just submarines. Also, did you know there was a movie on how the British cracked the Enigma code?
That's cool how the British found the Enigma on the U-Boat which is kind of unlucky for the Germans. How did the other German troops figure out the code.
I think it was interesting that the fact of the Enigma Machine/code had that many flaws. I know almost every coding system had flaws, but the Enigma was a very complex and deepened thought and conducted coding system.
Who had access to the code? Was it all of the soldiers or just a selected few? Where was it kept? How did the people receiving the message read it if all the letters were messed up and changed every day?
I really liked your article about Enigma. It's really cool how British and the U.S could figure out a way to decipher such an intelligent code. Just learn your lesson, even if something is really good, it can still be outsmarted.
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