The Enigma of the 20th Century
“Send the U-Boat to (51° 15' 43", -6° 45' 4"); attack at 15:00.” This could have been a message that was ciphered using a secret code during times of war. Cryptography, the study of securely coding messages, has been around for thousands of years (The Enigma Machine Explained). It started out with pencil-and-paper codes, made of substituting letters for each other in the alphabet. Then, there were more geometric codes, relying on using grids to write out messages and then writing down the letters in order of the rows or columns. Modern-day codes and ciphers are much more complicated than these outdated, antiquated codes. The jump from these simple codes to more sophisticated, complex, ones was in World War II. …show more content…
Previously, the Polish had broken Army and Air Force codes, but they were not able to break the naval codes. With the invasion of Poland looming, the Poles and the English met in a secret conference. Then, the Poles gave their secrets to the English, since they were allies. The English then launched Bletchley Park (Breaking Enigma) (Numberphile). At Bletchley Park, there was an important policy that stated the workers could not mention their work to anyone, and that violation of this policy was high treason (The Code-Breakers of Bletchley Park). It might seem cruel, but it was indispensable to Bletchley Park’s success. If the Nazis found out about the methods that were used to crack the code, then they might make the code impertinible to those methods. Therefore, the operation at Bletchley Park needed to be kept secret. The problem that the workers at Bletchley Park needed to solve was to find the rotor and plugboard positions relatively quickly. The machines were structurally identical, and the main way that the armed forces found the positions was quite crude: at the start of every month, a sheet with all the rotor positions and the plugboard positions was sent to every member of the armed forces that owned an Enigma machine. However, the idea that a code is only as strong as its weakest link showed that this was the weak point of the code. The delivery man could be incompetent, or a double agent. Even still, it was highly unlikely that the Allies got hold of one of these sheets. Therefore, they needed to find the daily positions of the rotors and the plugboard quickly. There was an important trait of the Enigma code: a letter could never be coded as itself. This flaw allowed a code breaker to deduce the Enigma code using plain logic. This could be accomplished through a system of guess, check, and finding contradictions, as established by Numberphile, but it was
“Send the U-Boat to (51° 15' 43", -6° 45' 4"); attack at 15:00.” This could have been a message that was ciphered using a secret code during times of war. Cryptography, the study of securely coding messages, has been around for thousands of years (The Enigma Machine Explained). It started out with pencil-and-paper codes, made of substituting letters for each other in the alphabet. Then, there were more geometric codes, relying on using grids to write out messages and then writing down the letters in order of the rows or columns. Modern-day codes and ciphers are much more complicated than these outdated, antiquated codes. The jump from these simple codes to more sophisticated, complex, ones was in World War II. …show more content…
Previously, the Polish had broken Army and Air Force codes, but they were not able to break the naval codes. With the invasion of Poland looming, the Poles and the English met in a secret conference. Then, the Poles gave their secrets to the English, since they were allies. The English then launched Bletchley Park (Breaking Enigma) (Numberphile). At Bletchley Park, there was an important policy that stated the workers could not mention their work to anyone, and that violation of this policy was high treason (The Code-Breakers of Bletchley Park). It might seem cruel, but it was indispensable to Bletchley Park’s success. If the Nazis found out about the methods that were used to crack the code, then they might make the code impertinible to those methods. Therefore, the operation at Bletchley Park needed to be kept secret. The problem that the workers at Bletchley Park needed to solve was to find the rotor and plugboard positions relatively quickly. The machines were structurally identical, and the main way that the armed forces found the positions was quite crude: at the start of every month, a sheet with all the rotor positions and the plugboard positions was sent to every member of the armed forces that owned an Enigma machine. However, the idea that a code is only as strong as its weakest link showed that this was the weak point of the code. The delivery man could be incompetent, or a double agent. Even still, it was highly unlikely that the Allies got hold of one of these sheets. Therefore, they needed to find the daily positions of the rotors and the plugboard quickly. There was an important trait of the Enigma code: a letter could never be coded as itself. This flaw allowed a code breaker to deduce the Enigma code using plain logic. This could be accomplished through a system of guess, check, and finding contradictions, as established by Numberphile, but it was