Alan Turing's Use Of Enigma During WWII

Throughout ww2, Germany thought that their secret codes for radio messages were indecipherable to the Allied Forces. However, in the end, enigma was cracked. The Allies were able to find out what enigma was, and how the Germans used it. From there they were able to get their hands on an enigma machine, examine it, and determine how the mechanics work. Finally, Alan Turing, an English computer scientist, mathematician, stepped into the picture and was able to crack the code in 1932. The decoding of enigma in WW2 was the main reason that the Allied forces won the war.

Enigma was a highly advanced electro-mechanical machine developed by the Nazis after WW1; specifically, Arthur Scherbius. This machine was used by the German military; this was their main device to encode strategic, wireless messages until WW2 came to an end. There were several enigma machines manufactured before and throughout WW2; each excelled in complexity and was harder decode be the receivers. The …show more content…
It takes in one letter letter and outputs a different one. Each letter passes through 3 rotors, bounces off of a reflector and in the end, passes through each rotor in the other direction. No matter what letter is imputed, the first of the 3 rotors click around one position, changing the output single time. After the first rotor clicks through 26 positions, the 2/3 rotors will click around, and when that rotor ha made all the changes the third rotor will follow. This leaves more than 17,000 different combinations before the encryption process repeats itself.

Adding additional complexity, there was a plug board, sitting between the main rotors, and the input and output, this swapped pairs of letters. Whoever received the message needed to know the exact setting of these rotors in order to reconstruct the coded message. The earliest machines could swap up to 6 pairs, later models pushed it to 10, and added a 4th