


The Construction - Early versions of the machine had three rotors (wheels) mounted freely on a single spindle, which together were called the " scrambler", and a "QWERTZUIO" keyboard which was standard in Germany but it was upper case only and had no number keys or punctuation keys.
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The Enigma Code was therefore thought to be unbreakable. The machine settings were also changed daily so that any minor decryption discoveries would have a very limited useful lifetime. The security and intelligence services however had to decrypt several thousand messages every day. Checking all 159 X 10 18 possible letter substitutions, even by machine, was clearly impractical and that's just for one message.

There is no weighting factor associated with different plaintext letters. Relatively few permutations were possible and once a ciphertext substitution had been identified it could usually be applied for each instance of the corresponding plaintext symbol in the message.īy contrast, the probability of a particular Enigma ciphertext symbol representing any plaintext input symbol depends on 159 X 10 18 possible permutations and is different for every keystroke and furthermore, the frequency of occurrence of all letters in the Enigma ciphertext is exactly the same. Traditional encryption schemes were mostly based on simple letter transposition or substitution and decryption often depended on identifying the relative frequency of occurrence of different letters in the ciphertext. The rotors provided 17,576 possible letter substitutions for each keystroke and because at least one of the rotors moved by one position with each keystroke, every keystroke would generate a different ciphertext, even for the same plaintext letter. In fact it was not a random choice but depended on the order in which its rotors were placed in the machine, the starting position of each rotor, the internal wiring within each rotor and the connections on a plugboard. What made the machine special however was that for each keystroke there were 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 possible ways of generating the substitute letter or ciphertext from the 26 in the alphabet in what appeared to be a random choice, though selecting the same letter was not allowed. The Working Principle - The Enigma machine basically provided a simple substitution of a plaintext symbol with a different ciphertext symbol generated by the machine. How it Worked and How the Code was Brokenīy way of introduction, see the Historical Background to Enigma and the Key Players Involved. Woodbank does not monitor or record these emails
