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With their help," writes Rejewski, "we continued solving Enigma daily keys." [3] The sheets were used by the Poles to make the first wartime decryption of an Enigma message, on 17 January 1940. [7] [9] In May 1940, the Germans once again completely changed the procedure for enciphering message keys (with the exception of a Norwegian network).
Enigma wiring diagram with arrows and the numbers 1 to 9 showing how current flows from key depression to a lamp being lit. The A key is encoded to the D lamp. D yields A, but A never yields A; this property was due to a patented feature unique to the Enigmas, and could be exploited by cryptanalysts in some situations.
On 1 February 1942, the Enigma messages began to be encoded using a new Enigma version that had been brought into use. The previous 3-rotor Enigma model had been modified with the old reflector replaced by a thin rotor and a new thin reflector. Breaking Shark on 3-rotor bombes would have taken 50 to 100 times as long as an average Air Force or ...
The selection of rotors in use in the Enigma's scrambler, and their positions on the spindle (Walzenlage or "wheel order"). Possible wheel orders numbered 60 (three rotors from a choice of five) for army and air force networks and 336 (three rotors from a choice of eight) for the naval networks.
Each scrambler rotor could be set to any one of its 26 starting positions (any letter of the alphabet). For the Enigma machines with only three rotors, their sequence in the scrambler—which was known as the wheel order (WO) to Allied cryptanalysts—could be selected from the six that are possible.
Description: To explain the Enigma, we use this wiring diagram. To simplify the example, only four components of each are shown. In reality, there are 26 lamps, keys, plugs and wirings inside the rotors.
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.
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