Archive for July, 2010
Poland Bombe
Eventually, the sheer weight of communiqués sent using Enigma became so large that the Polish code breakers could no longer cope manually deciphering the messages.
They went back to Wytwornia Radiotechniczna AVA and asked them to build a machine for electromechanically testing through ranges of possible rotor settings automatically.
Poland
In fact, it seems, Poland had been regularly breaking the Enigma machine messages since it’s invention. They had been doing this by a variety of methods probably the most notable of which up until this point was by frequency counting.
In about 1932 all of the Poles code breaking became slowly obsolete as the Enigma machine evolved faster than their code breaking could.
Enigma Security
Nazi Germany were absolutely convinced that messages sent using Enigma were secure.
Receiving the Message
The message would be received by an operator sitting at an enigma machine and that machine would be set up identical to the one sending the message.
Sending the Message
The Message to be transmitted now consisted of two parts, the informational header and the encoded message itself.
The encoded part of the message would have looked something like :
Setting Up Enigma
Setting up the Enigma machine ready to send a message was quite a complex operation which involved quite a few steps.
Enigma
A solution was already at hand to the Nazi Military and had been since 1918 when a machine called Enigma was invented by Arthur Scherbius to allow secure communications for the Financial Institutions. The banks never really got on with it but the Nazi Military pounced on Enigma as the solution to their communication problems for their fast moving war.
