Cryptography

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The Successful Decryption of the German Enigma Cipher
Introduction
In 2020, divers on assignment for the World-Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) fished out the famous code machine, Enigma, from the Bay of Gelting in Germany. The machine is considered a historic artifact because of the role it played in World War II. The machine was invented soon after World War I and was later adopted by the German Armed forces between 1926 and 1935. The German military utilized the machine to transit coded messages involving troop movements, commands, tactical information, strategies, and implementation of ground-to-air operations on the Eastern front during the war. On July 9th, 1941, a team lead by Alan Turin broke the code and gained access to vital information. The breakthrough is considered an important step to victory for the Allies.
The Enigma Code
In cryptography, a quantifiable entity used to measure the quality of a code is determined by the number of possible outcomes a person must go through to arrive at the correct outcome. The code was considered ‘uncrackable’ because possible outcomes were in excess of 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 for a single encoded message CITATION Chr12 \l 2057 (Christensen). The Enigma machine consisted of four main parts: keyboard, lamp board, rotors, and the plugboard. A key pressed on the keyboard triggers a signal that moves through the other three parts to encrypt an alphabet. When there is a message to be transmitted, the sender types each of the letters on a standard keyboard. The signal generated by this action passes through the plugboard. The purpose of the plugboard is to switch letters around.
At this stage, the letter pressed on the keyboard is given a new identity. The stage has three physical rotors wired internally. Each of the rotors changes the output alphabet which is the send back through the cycle by the reflector. Another function of the rotors is to complicate the code further. The subsequent rotor can only begin after the rotor preceding turns through the 26 alphabets (similar to clockwork). The reflected signal then comes back through the plugboard resulting in a final alphabet on the lightboard. The sender then copies the letters on the lightboard and sends the message through a morse code. The receiver writes the message down then types it in the machine to produce the initial letter typed by the sender. Since the morse code signal was already detectable, the code helped to make it difficult for unauthorized entities to understand the messages transmitted b...