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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 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 Enigma machines produced a 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]
In the early 20th century, the invention of complex mechanical and electromechanical machines, such as the Enigma rotor machine, provided more sophisticated and efficient means of encryption; and the subsequent introduction of electronics and computing has allowed elaborate schemes of still greater complexity, most of which are entirely ...
A three-rotor Enigma with plugboard (Steckerbrett) Depiction of a series of three rotors from an Enigma machine. The Enigma is an electro-mechanical rotor machine used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. It was developed in Germany in the 1920s.
It was a much more complex system than Enigma; the decoding procedure involved trying so many possibilities that it was impractical to do by hand. Flowers and Frank Morrell (also at Dollis Hill) designed the Heath Robinson, in an attempt to automate the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz SZ-40/42 cipher machine. [5]
It has sometimes been erroneously stated that Turing designed Colossus to aid the cryptanalysis of the Enigma. [4] (Turing's machine that helped decode Enigma was the electromechanical Bombe, not Colossus.) [5] The prototype, Colossus Mark 1, was shown to be working in December 1943 and was in use at Bletchley Park by early 1944. [1]