The Enigma and the Bombe | Search for a title, author or keyword | ||||||||
The Enigma and the Bombe Cryptography entered the machine age toward the end of World War I with the invention of the rotary electro-mechanical enciphering machine. Shortly after the end of World War I, Arthur Scherbius, a German inventor, developed and patented such a machine for the commercial market. He called his machine Enigma. Scherbius' Enigma, in a modified and improved form, was later used widely throughout the German armed forces as the standard method of encrypting messages prior to radio transmission. This website describes how the German Enigma enciphering machine was broken by the British bombe - the cryptanalytical machine designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman at Bletchley Park, the centre of Allied codebreaking during World War II. The bombes were neither the only, nor the first, method of breaking the Enigma but the breaks facilitated by the bombes from 1940 onwards yielded intelligence in a quantity unprecedented in military history and made a major contribution to Allied victory. This page provides links to two essays, each with schematic diagrams. The first essay describes the Enigma enciphering machine and the second describes the logical operations of the British bombe. The Enigma machine, and its method of operation, is well-known and accordingly the essay concerning the Enigma is relatively concise. Since there is less material available concerning the logical operations of the bombe, this essay is of greater length and detail. The Enigma was not the only enciphering machine employed by Germany in World War II. The other machines, the Siemens T52 Geheimschreiber and the Lorenz SZ40/SZ42 Schlüsselzusatz were codenamed STURGEON and TUNNY respectively at Bletchley Park. The traffic derived from TUNNY was known at Bletchley Park as FISH.
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