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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.
All parts of the German Wehrmacht used the rotor cipher machine to encrypt their secret messages. Enigma.However, different models were used. While the army and air force used the Enigma I almost exclusively, there were different model variants of the Enigma-M for the navy, which usually referred to it as the "Schlüssel M".
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 .
Military Enigma machine, model "Enigma I", used during the late 1930s and during the war; displayed at Museo scienza e tecnologia Milano, Italy. German Army cryptographic systems of World War II were based on the use of three types of cryptographic machines that were used to encrypt communications between units at the division level.
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.
A fruitful source of cribs was re-encipherments of messages that had previously been decrypted either from a lower-level manual cipher or from another Enigma network. [119] This was called a kiss and happened particularly with German naval messages being sent in the dockyard cipher and repeated verbatim in an Enigma cipher.
From the early 1930s to the start of the war, Germany had a good understanding of, and indeed a lead in, both cryptoanalytic and cryptographic cryptology services. The various agencies had cracked the French–English inter-allied cipher, the Germans with some help from the Italian Communications Intelligence Organization stole American diplomatic codes, and codes taken from the British ...
German military Enigma was first broken in December 1932 by Marian Rejewski and the Polish Cipher Bureau, using a combination of brilliant mathematics, the services of a spy in the German office responsible for administering encrypted communications, and good luck.