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The British read unsteckered Enigma messages sent during the Spanish Civil War, [15] and also some Italian naval traffic enciphered early in World War II. The strength of the security of the ciphers that were produced by the Enigma machine was a product of the large numbers associated with the scrambling process.
Agents sent messages to the Abwehr in a simple code which was then sent on using an Enigma machine. The simple codes were broken and helped break the daily Enigma cipher. This breaking of the code enabled the Double-Cross System to operate. [19] From October 1944, the German Abwehr used the Schlüsselgerät 41 in limited quantities. [20]
A similar break into the most secure Japanese diplomatic cipher, designated Purple by the US Army Signals Intelligence Service, started before the US entered the war. Product from this source was called Magic. On the other side, German code breaking in World War II achieved some notable successes cracking British naval and other ciphers.
Codebreakers tried to break PURPLE communiques by hand but found they could not. Then the codebreakers realized that it was not a manual additive or substitution code like RED and BLUE, but a machine-generated code similar to Germany's Enigma cipher. Decoding was slow and much of the traffic was still hard to break.
Up to July 25, 1939, the Poles had been breaking Enigma messages for over six and a half years without telling their French and British allies. On December 15, 1938, two new rotors, IV and V, were introduced (three of the now five rotors being selected for use in the machine at a time).
The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes. London & New York: Allen Lane & McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-7139-1294-4. Gordon Welchman, The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes (1997: Cleobury Mortimer, Baldwin) ISBN 978-0-947712-34-1; Irene Young, Enigma Variations: A Memoir of Love and War (1990, Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh) ISBN 1-85158-294-0
The title refers to the French, British and Polish teams which worked on breaking the Enigma cipher, known by shorthand as "X", "Y" and "Z", respectively. The Enigma cipher, produced by the Enigma machine, was used from the 1920s to the end of World War II by Germany—later Nazi Germany—for military and other high security communications.
The laboratory was established in 1942 by the Navy and National Cash Register Company to design and manufacture a series of code-breaking machines ("bombes") targeting German Enigma machines, based on earlier work by the British at Bletchley Park (which in turn owed something to pre-war Polish cryptanalytical work). Joseph Desch led the effort. [2]