Enigma Machine
Posted by jackfolla on August 06 2008 02:17:02
The Enigma machine was invented by Albert Scherbius. The Enigma was originally patented commercial product. The Enigma offered more than 712 million possible key combinations. The inventor of Enigma tried to sell his machine to large corporations. In 1935, the Nazi navy bought the rights and restricted the sale to the army.
The Enigma was a cipher machine that was used by the German Forces during WW11, to encrypt messages sent by radio. The Germans thought that the Enigma was so secure that even the capture of a machine by the Allies was not considered serious.
May 9, 1941: As the German submarine U-110 sunk, the crew abandonned ship. The ship was captured by British destructor HMS Aubretia. The British boarded the Sub, and succeeded in capturing an Enigma machine. They also captured the books containing the planned settings for the rotors.
The center of the British codebreaking effort was based at Bletchley Park. Several machines called "Turing bombes" were constructed to test and reduce the number of possible keys for each message before decryption. Various types of Enigma machines were used by the Italians and Japanese.