Enigma machine
The plugboard, keyboard, lamps, and finger-
wheels of the rotors emerging from the inner
lid of a three-rotor German military Enigma
machine
The Enigma cipher machine
• Enigma machine
• Enigma rotors
• Breaking Enigma
• Polish Cipher
Bureau
• Doubles
• Grill
• Clock
• Cyclometer
• Card catalog
• Bomba
• Sheets
• Bletchley Park
• Banburismus
• Herivel tip
• Bombe
• Hut 6
• Hut 8
• PC Bruno
• Cadix
• Ultra
Enigma in use, 1943
An Enigma machine is any of a family of
related electro-mechanical rotor machines
used for the encryption and decryption of
secret messages. The first Enigma was inven-
ted by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at
the end of World War I.[1] This model and its
variants were used commercially from the
early 1920s, and adopted by military and gov-
ernment services of several countries — most
notably by Nazi Germany before and during
World War II.[2] A range of Enigma models
was produced, but the German military mod-
el, the Wehrmacht Enigma, is the version
most commonly discussed.
The machine has become notorious be-
cause Polish mathematicians-cryptographers
and then Allied cryptographers were able to
cryptanalyze, and thus decrypt, a vast num-
ber of messages which had been enciphered
using the Enigma. The intelligence gleaned
from this source, codenamed ULTRA by the
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Enigma machine
1
British, was a substantial aid to the Allied
war effort. The exact influence of ULTRA is
debated, but an oft-repeated assessment is
that decryption of German ciphers hastened
the end of
the European war by two
years.[3][4][5]
Though the Enigma cipher had crypto-
graphic weaknesses, in practice it was only in
combination with other factors (procedural
flaws, operator mistakes, occasional captured
hardware and key tables, etc.) that those
weaknesses allowed Allied cryptographers to
cryptanalyze so many messages.[6]
Description
Enigma wiring diagram showing current
flow. The "A" key is encoded to the "D" lamp.
D yields A, but A never yields A; this property
was due to