7/14/2023 0 Comments The enigma codeSadly, Turing is missing from Enigma the film. What was it, you ask? Amazingly, as you will learn above, the very thing that made the Enigma nearly impossible to break, its ability to encode messages without ever repeating a letter, also made the code decipherable. Otherwise, no novel, no movie, no drama (and maybe no victory?). Of course, the Enigma Machine had to have a fatal flaw. There’s a little more to the machine than that, but Dr. In the German military machines, the total number of possible combinations for message encryptions comes to a staggering figure in the quadrillions. This allowed the coding coming through the rotors to be resequenced for an extra level of scrambling. But the German military machines had an extra layer of encoding: at the front of their machines was a “plugboard,” something like a small switchboard. Now at this point, the machine was nothing more than what was available to any bank or business wishing to transmit trade secrets. The machine was quite complicated for its time it works by sending the characters typed by the keys through a series of circuits-first through three rotors like those on a combination bike lock, but each with 26 places instead of ten. Oh, but it’s clever, you see, because the Enigma machine (the one above belongs to science writer Simon Singh) translates ordinary messages into code through an ingenious method by which no letter in the code ever repeats, making it almost impossible to decode in the ordinary ways. Developed by the Germans, it’s a marvelous encryption method set into a small box that when opened resembles little more than a fancy WWII-era typewriter. Grime gives us a thorough tour of the Enigma machine (Sir Mick owns one, by the way… but back to the history…).
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