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The Enigma machine was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. [4] The German firm Scherbius & Ritter, co-founded by Scherbius, patented ideas for a cipher machine in 1918 and began marketing the finished product under the brand name Enigma in 1923, initially targeted at commercial markets. [5]
Scherbius' Enigma patent – U.S. patent 1,657,411, which was granted in 1928. Arthur Scherbius (30 October 1878 – 13 May 1929) was a German electrical engineer who invented the mechanical cipher Enigma machine. [1] He patented the invention and later sold the machine under the brand name Enigma.
The Enigma machines were a family of portable cipher machines with rotor scramblers. [1] Good operating procedures, properly enforced, would have made the plugboard Enigma machine unbreakable to the Allies at that time. [2] [3] [4] The German plugboard-equipped Enigma became the principal crypto-system of the German Reich and later of other ...
1917 – Gilbert Vernam develops first practical implementation of a teletype cipher, now known as a stream cipher and, later, with Joseph Mauborgne the one-time pad; 1917 – Zimmermann telegram intercepted and decrypted, advancing U.S. entry into World War I; 1919 – Weimar Germany Foreign Office adopts (a manual) one-time pad for some traffic
The title refers to the French, British and Polish teams which worked on breaking the Enigma cipher, known by shorthand as "X", "Y" and "Z", respectively. The Enigma cipher, produced by the Enigma machine, was used from the 1920s to the end of World War II by Germany—later Nazi Germany—for military and other high security communications.
The machine was developed by British mathematician Alan Turing, and it was used to decode messages sent by the Nazi military. Bought for $115, a WWII Enigma machine sells for $51,000 Skip to main ...
Possibly the most important codebreaking event of the war was the successful decryption by the Allies of the German "Enigma" Cipher. The first break into Enigma was accomplished by Polish Cipher Bureau around 1932; the techniques and insights used were passed to the French and British Allies just before the outbreak of the war in 1939.
A number of methods and devices had to be invented in response to continual improvements in German operating procedure and to the Enigma machine itself. The earliest method for reconstructing daily keys was the "grill", based on the fact that the plugboard's connections exchanged only six pairs of letters, leaving fourteen letters unchanged. [22]