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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 were a family of portable cipher machines with rotor scramblers. [1] Good operating procedures, properly enforced, would have made the plugboard Enigma machine unbreakable to the Allies at that time. [2] [3] [4] The German plugboard-equipped Enigma became the principal crypto-system of the German Reich and
The polyalphabetic cipher was most clearly explained by Leon Battista Alberti around AD 1467, for which he was called the "father of Western cryptology". [1] Johannes Trithemius, in his work Poligraphia, invented the tabula recta, a critical component of the Vigenère cipher.
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 nations involved fielded a plethora of code and cipher systems, many of the latter using rotor machines. As a result, the theoretical and practical aspects of cryptanalysis, or codebreaking, were much advanced. Possibly the most important codebreaking event of the war was the successful decryption by the Allies of the German "Enigma" Cipher.
Marian Adam Rejewski (Polish: [ˈmarjan rɛˈjɛfskʲi] ⓘ; 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French military intelligence.
"Enigma" refers to a family of electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines.These produced a polyalphabetic substitution cipher and were widely thought to be unbreakable in the 1920s, when a variant of the commercial Model D was first used by the Reichswehr.