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The Enigma machine was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. [4] The German firm Scherbius & Ritter, co-founded by Scherbius, patented ideas for a cipher machine in 1918 and began marketing the finished product under the brand name Enigma in 1923, initially targeted at commercial markets. [5]
Scherbius' Enigma patent – U.S. patent 1,657,411, which was granted in 1928. Arthur Scherbius (30 October 1878 – 13 May 1929) was a German electrical engineer who invented the mechanical cipher Enigma machine. [1] He patented the invention and later sold the machine under the brand name Enigma.
The Enigma machines combined multiple levels of movable rotors and plug cables to produce a particularly complex polyalphabetic substitution cipher.. During World War I, inventors in several countries realised that a purely random key sequence, containing no repetitive pattern, would, in principle, make a polyalphabetic substitution cipher unbreakable. [6]
Allied cipher machines used in World War II included the British TypeX and the American SIGABA; both were electromechanical rotor designs similar in spirit to the Enigma, albeit with major improvements. Neither is known to have been broken by anyone during the War.
Soon after the July 1939 meeting near Warsaw at which the Polish Cipher Bureau gave the British and French details of the wiring of Enigma machine's rotors and their method of decrypting Enigma machine's messages, Turing and Knox developed a broader solution. [75]
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 British bombe was developed from a device known as the "bomba" (Polish: bomba kryptologiczna), which had been designed in Poland at the Biuro Szyfrów (Cipher Bureau) by cryptologist Marian Rejewski, who had been breaking German Enigma messages for the previous seven years, using it and earlier machines.
Welchman invented the "Diagonal Board", an addition which made the British Bombe immensely more powerful. The Diagonal Board exploited the self-reciprocity of the plugboard element of the Enigma; that is, if on the plugboard, letter B is Steckered (plugged) to letter G, then G is also Steckered to B. If 26 rows of 26 way connectors are stacked ...