16 July,2009 08:59 AM IST | | Balaji Narasimhan
On July 15, 1928, this machine encoded its first message. Find out more about this World War II cipher system
Every end is just a beginning and when World War I ended, the first Enigma was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius. In 1928, the first message was transmitted by the Enigma. This system was used by Nazi Germany extensively for transmitting secret coded messages during World War II. The British came up with a system called ULTRA and thanks to this system, the war ended two years earlier, says Wikipedia. This was because decryption of German ciphers enabled the Allies to foil their plans for world domination.
How it works
According to Andy Carlson, to use the Enigma, the user types a message using the keyboard. When each key is pressed, it energises one of 26 letter circuits within the machine. Power is passed from the keyboard to one of 26 end contacts in the scrambler unit. Power then passes through the three rotors, each being wired so that it changes the letter to another one. The machine does this by applying a scrambling operation to the original letter.
The wiring of the machine is altered after each letter by rotating the first rotor by one position (and the next after 26 letters). Therefore, pressing the same plaintext letter twice is unlikely to result in the same cipher text letter. For more details, visit the Enigma Java applet page.
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Try it now: This Java applet allows you to type in messages and encode them using Enigma. To use it, visit https://homepages.tesco.net/~andycarlson/enigma/enigma_j.html |
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How it works: This illustration shows the key components of the Enigma machine |
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The Enigma lives on: Though this is an ancient system of cryptography, it still has new avatars. The machine shown here, which was inspired by the Enigma, was constructed in 2002 by Netherlands-based Tatjana van Vark. It uses 40-point rotors and uses characters, numbers and even punctuation. Each rotor contains 509 parts. |
