Christian Heimes wrote:
Gregory Ewing wrote:
Actually I gather it had a lot to do with the fact that
the Germans made some blunders in the way they used the
Enigma that seriously compromised its security. There
was reportedly a branch of the German forces that used
their Enigmas differently, avoiding those mistakes, and
the British never managed to crack any of their messages.
IIRC some versions of the Enigma weren't cracked because they used a
different setup and different daily keys.
The predecessor of the Enigma was cracked by Polish scientists years
before WW2 started. Some flaws in the instructions and a known plain
text attack made the crack of the Enigma practical. It took the British
scientists merely hours rather than days or weeks to decipher the daily
key with some smart tricks. For example they started fake attacks on
ships or cities just to have the names in some encrypted reports.
I believe that all of Enigma was eventually cracked cos of two major flaws.
1) A letter could never be sent as itself.
2) The Luftwaffe were very poor when compared to the Wehrmacht or
Kriegsmarine about security so they were a major leak of data regarding
the other organisations.
3) The users instead of using random three letter combinations kept
using the same ones. HIT LER and BER LIN were popular, but the most
famous one at Bletchley Park was the name of the guy's girlfriend.
Further, the far more powerful Geheimscreiber was also cracked at
Bletchley by using Colossus. Sorry some years since I read the book
about this so can't remember the title or author.
Regards.
Mark Lawrence.
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