The Enigma Story: The Truth Behind the 'Unbreakable' Wo… (2024)

FAQs

Who actually solved the Enigma code? ›

Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician. Born in London in 1912, he studied at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. He was already working part-time for the British Government's Code and Cypher School before the Second World War broke out.

Well, the Enigma wasn't perfect, and contained one flaw which was exploited by Turing in order to solve the code. He did this by building a giant machine called the Bombe, which essentially worked backwards through the Enigma Machine coding process in order to determine how the machine was set each day.

To decrypt a message, one needs not only an Enigma machine, but also the knowledge of the starting state, i.e. at which positions the wheels were when the text was typed in. To decrypt the message, the machine must be set to the same starting state, and the cipher text is entered. Output is the plain text.

Intelligence from decrypted Enigma messages, code-named "ULTRA," was extremely secret, and very few people knew about it. While the Germans never found out the Allies could solve their codes, they suspected it as their ability to sink Allied shipping slipped dramatically in 1942.

While no slouch and while he did contribute to the ongoing cracking of Enigma, he had no role in the initial discovery of the technique, nor did he display (nor did he need to display) any of the heroism that led to this discovery getting to Britain and to protect this secret widely acknowledged to have been crucial to ...

Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, MBE (née Clarke; 24 June 1917 – 4 September 1996) was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist who worked as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.

While there, Turing built a device known as the Bombe. This machine was able to use logic to decipher the encrypted messages produced by the Enigma. However, it was human understanding that enabled the real breakthroughs. The Bletchley Park team made educated guesses at certain words the message would contain.

Due to the problems of counterfactual history, it is hard to estimate the precise effect Ultra intelligence had on the war. However, official war historian Harry Hinsley estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14 million lives.

The only woman to work in the nerve centre of the quest to crack German Enigma ciphers, Clarke rose to deputy head of Hut 8, and would be its longest-serving member.

Rejewski was now joined by Różycki and Zygalski. Their contributions included the Różycki clock and the Zygalski sheets Subsequently the Poles were able to replicate the Enigma machine and design mechanical devices which allowed them to break the Enigma code.

What was the flaw in the Enigma code? ›

Enigma had one fatal flaw, and a genius, hand-picked team at Bletchley Park exploited this flaw. The flaw was that the Enigma machine could never substitute one letter with the same letter (A could never be coded as A, for example). It was the way the machine was designed.

The Vigenère cipher is a method of encrypting messages by using a series of different Caesar ciphers based on the letters of a particular keyword. The Vigenère cipher is more powerful than a single Caesar cipher and is much harder to crack.

After the war Turing worked on the design of the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) at the National Physical Laboratory, which many people see as the forerunner to the modern computer.

Who broke the Enigma code? The Enigma code was broken through the collaboration of the French secret service, the Polish Cipher Bureau, and the British government cryptological establishment, Bletchley Park.

British mathematician Alan Turing, who helped crack Nazi Germany's 'Enigma' code and laid the groundwork for modern computing, was pardoned on Tuesday, six decades after his conviction for hom*osexuality is said to have driven him to suicide.

Polish Cipher Bureau mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski broke the German Enigma cipher machine codes. Working with engineers from the AVA Radio Manufacturing Company, they built the 'bomba' – the first cryptanalytic machine to break Enigma codes.

The Enigma code was first broken by the Poles, under the leadership of mathematician Marian Rejewski, in the early 1930s. In 1939, with the growing likelihood of a German invasion, the Poles turned their information over to the British, who set up a secret code-breaking group known as Ultra, under mathematician Alan M.