Map The Next Letter example essay topic

Enigma Machine The German Light Cruiser Magda board ran around the Baltic sea, the Russians that were in that area captured the ship and found in it the German Navy Secret code book. The British used it to decode German Navel messages, so that they would know what the German's were going to do next. When the war was over the British told the world that they had found the Germans code book, which made the Germans realize that code books were not a good way of getting such important messages around. So they decided that they needed a code machine. In Berlin man made an encoding machine available on the market, named the Enigma Variations. You press a letter on the keyboard and a different letter is typed.

Each time you press that letter the letter that comes out changes. It has so many approximately 3 (10114) different variations. The Polish had the insight that the codes could be deciphered by mathematicians. Bartram p photographed the keys to break Enigma's codes, and sold them to the Polish. The Germans later added two more rotors, and they found out that they needed help, so they brought a bunch of really smart people together to see if any of them could find a way to break the codes. One man found a way to build a machine that would take the encoded message and come up with every possible out come for it.

And all they would need to do is look through them and find out the one that makes sense. All the mathematicians couldn t break it, and this was the only way that they found that was possible! "The work of Enigma required enormous concentration and at least eighty intercepts collected on the same day, using the same setting on the German cipher devices" [Kozaczuk]. This machine looks alot like a typewriter, but it has an extra panel built into th lid.

Twenty-six circular glass windows in the panel, were the keys which had the letters of the alphabet on them, just like the keyboard. On the inside of the panel under the glass buttons there was a identical number of glow lamps. Inside of the machine was a set of rotors, also known as rotating drums, and a "reversing drum" that were all mounted on the same axle. A complex system of wiring included this axle, i guess you could say that it was one of it's main parts.

This machine was powered by a battery or an electrical outlet which passed through a small transformer, so that the power wasn t to great. The operator of the machine presses a key, and the ENIGMA machine produces its substitution, then a lightbulb under one of the letters turns on. The person then copies down the letter associated with the lightbulb and the next letter of the message is "typed". The process is repeated until all letters in the input message have been typed.

The way this can happen is because of the rotors. For example if you press the letter A it may give out the letter C, then if you press the letter A again it may give you the letter T, and so on. The rotor is simply a letter-substitution piece built into the machine. On one side of the rotor there are 26 contacts representing the 26 letters of the alphabet, and those 26 contacts are wired to 26 different contacts on the other side of the rotor. If the lamps are connected to the 26 contacts on the other side of the rotor, that positioning would be a performance of a simple mapping cipher. However, instead of the lamps, the rotor's output connectors are connected to another rotor.

The second rotor provides a second mapping. Then, that rotor is connected to yet a third rotor, providing three levels of substitution. In some cases there are even more than just three rotors, there can be five, ten, or even more. Each of the rotors has a notch on it that causes the next rotor in the series to move by one position whenever the notch passes by the indicated letter. The effect of this rotation is that after each letter is encrypted, an entirely new letter map is used to map the next letter. Each letter in the output message has its own map associated with it, and because the rotors are moved with each letter, the letter mapping depends on not only the letter value, but its position in the message as well.

This combination makes the ENIGMA Machine much stronger than other cipher machines. The one weakness of the ENIGMA Machine was that the rotors were fixed and there were t very many of them. Once the allies had stolen a couple of ENIGMA machines and had a full set of rotors, cracking the code became a matter of trying different combinations of the available rotors until the correct ones were found. However, the ENIGMA's good, brilliant design was the basis of the strongest encryption available for many years after the war ended..