Breaking the Enigma
Today we visited Bletchley Park, the facility in which codebreakers deciphered encrypted messages intercepted from Axis communications during WW2. It was estimated that the intel gathered at this top-secret location helped shorten the war by at least two years, saving millions of lives.
Throughout the war, it was common for both sides to encrypt communications to prevent the enemy from reading intercepted messages. A cipher would be used to encrypt a message on the sending side and then also decrypt on the receiving end. Without the cipher, the message could not be read. As a result, a great effort went into analyzing the encrypted message to break the cipher and read the plain-text message. A common cipher used by the Axis powers was the enigma machine. With nearly 159 quintillion possible configurations, the enigma was believed to be an unbreakable cipher and was used extensively by the Nazis during the war.
But while the ciphers generated by this machine should have been impossible to guess, the machine suffered from one fatal flaw in its security. When a character on the enigma was entered, it would always output some other letter according to the current state of the machine's complex wiring. However, since a pressed character could never output the same character, this led to a vulnerability which eventually let the machine be cracked. The Allied version of the same enigma machine did not have this vulnerability and was never broken. I found it amazing how such a tiny design oversight could very well have served as the tipping point for WW2.
Throughout the war, it was common for both sides to encrypt communications to prevent the enemy from reading intercepted messages. A cipher would be used to encrypt a message on the sending side and then also decrypt on the receiving end. Without the cipher, the message could not be read. As a result, a great effort went into analyzing the encrypted message to break the cipher and read the plain-text message. A common cipher used by the Axis powers was the enigma machine. With nearly 159 quintillion possible configurations, the enigma was believed to be an unbreakable cipher and was used extensively by the Nazis during the war.
But while the ciphers generated by this machine should have been impossible to guess, the machine suffered from one fatal flaw in its security. When a character on the enigma was entered, it would always output some other letter according to the current state of the machine's complex wiring. However, since a pressed character could never output the same character, this led to a vulnerability which eventually let the machine be cracked. The Allied version of the same enigma machine did not have this vulnerability and was never broken. I found it amazing how such a tiny design oversight could very well have served as the tipping point for WW2.
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| Enigma machine at Bletchley Park |
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