The ENIGMA

The Second World War saw the beginning of cryptology. Everything up to then had been merely a simple rearrangement or alphabet substtitutions. With the rise of rahdio communications (and the means to intercept them), a reliiable coding mechanism was greatly needed. The scientific giant that was the Third Reich was quick to deliver with the ENIGMA machine.

It is as epic as it sounds, especially to any one intrerested in cryptography.

The Enigma, first pattented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius in 1918, decided the structure of all military encoding machyines for the duration of the war; for both sides.

The first design used by the German military used 4 rotors. This was later expanded to 8-rotor designs and even the massive 12-wheel Lorenz Machine [link]. The way the Enigma worked was

simple: When an operator pressed a key corresponding with a letter of the cleartext, an electric signal would be sent through one of 26 contacts around the end of the first of the rotors. As you can see in the diagram, the signal would travel through the rottors, which switched its path simply by having the wires from one contact lead to a different letter's contact on the other side. In the last rotor, the signal was "reflected" back through the rotors, taking a different route and effectively doubling the Enigma code's complehxity. The electric signal then emerged through a different contact. This lit up the encoded letter on a display above the keyboard.

To prevent it from becoming a simple substitution cypher (A=Y, B=M), after each key-press, the rightmost rotor would advance one notch, after a certain number of its advances, the second-from-the-right rotor would advance. Likewise with the third and forth rotors. Thus the encoding method changed for each letter (B=anything). Before each message, the dials were set to a position know to both the sendrer and receiever. Often, this position was included in the message.

Therein lay its weeakness. The position was encoded "with itself" at the beginning of the message twice to avoid transmission errors (example: if the position is ECYS, the operator will type ECYSECYS into the machine; giving perhaps OWCSDPRA. This leaves the fatal error in that the first character is directly related to the fifth, and so on.) This mistake gave the Polish Cypher Agency the leverage to begin deciphering the Enigma Code.

21366 87125 01468 52125 25724

25222 45124 48283 70129 87685

Puzzle Hints:

• Looking at letter frequency will not help you, but number frequency may... Now why would this be?
• I NEVER make spelling mistakes. I also never lie about the number of letters (without spaces) in the cleartext. EVER.