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The Enigma machine is a cipher device developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic, and military communication.It was employed extensively by Nazi Germany during World War II, in all branches of the German military.
First, there is the identification of the system in use, in this case Enigma; second, breaking the system by establishing exactly how encryption takes place, and third, solving, which involves finding the way that the machine was set up for an individual message, i.e. the message key. [8]
The Enigma encryption is a self-inverse function, meaning that it substitutes letters reciprocally: if A is transformed into R, then R is transformed into A. The plugboard transformation maintained the self-inverse quality, but the plugboard wiring, unlike the rotor positions, does not change during the encryption.
The German Enigma used a combination key to control the operation of the machine: rotor order, which rotors to install, which ring setting for each rotor, which initial setting for each rotor, and the settings of the stecker plugboard. The rotor settings were trigrams (for example, "NJR") to indicate the way the operator was to set the machine.
Decryption of the Enigma Cipher allowed the Allies to read important parts of German radio traffic on important networks and was an invaluable source of military intelligence throughout the war. Intelligence from this source and other high level sources, such as Cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher , was eventually called Ultra .
Computer use has thus supplanted linguistic cryptography, both for cipher design and cryptanalysis. Many computer ciphers can be characterized by their operation on binary bit sequences (sometimes in groups or blocks), unlike classical and mechanical schemes, which generally manipulate traditional characters (i.e., letters and digits) directly ...
Reconstruction of the appearance of cyclometer, a device used to break the encryption of the Enigma machine.Based on sketches in Marian Rejewski's memoirs.. Cryptanalysis (from the Greek kryptós, "hidden", and analýein, "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. [1]
The standard Enigma model, Enigma I, used three rotors. At the end of the stack of rotors was an additional, non-rotating disk, the "reflector," wired such that the input was connected electrically back out to another contact on the same side and thus was "reflected" back through the three-rotor stack to produce the ciphertext .