Many have heard that during the Great Patriotic War The German side used a special encryption machine for encryption - “Enigma”.
According to sources, this device was a new word in cryptography at that time.
How did it work?
Replacement cipher
First, you should know what a “Replacement Cipher” is. This is the usual replacement of some letters with others. Those. in such a cipher, instead of the letter “A”, for example, “T” is used, instead of “B” - “S”, etc.This type of cipher is quite easy to crack. If you have a more or less long encrypted message, you can perform a frequency analysis and compare it with the frequency of use of letters in the language. Those. if there are many letters “T” in a message encrypted with a replacement cipher, then this is a clear sign that this letter hides some kind of vowel (for example, “A” or “O”, since usually these letters are the most common in the language) .
Enigma device
Enigma was like a dynamic Caesar cipher. Those. Initially, the drums were set to a certain initial value (a kind of random seed), which was the key. Further, when typing letters, each letter was encrypted with a Caesar cipher, and then this cipher was changed to another.Changing the cipher was achieved using rotors.
The rotors were disks that had 26 contacts on each side, connected inside the rotor in a certain (random) way. It was when passing through the rotor that the signal was transformed from the letter “A” to the letter “T”, etc.
There were several rotors and they turned after typing each symbol (in the manner of a reel counter).
In addition, there was also a patch panel into which wires could be inserted, which changed the letters in pairs. Those. By inserting one end of the wire into socket “A” and the other into “E”, you swapped these letters.
The principle of operation can be understood by looking at the circuit diagram:
The number of rotors varied according to different years and for various purposes (for example, the navy used Enigmas with a large number of rotors).
To make hacking more difficult, operators coded frequently used words (names) differently each time. For example, the word "Minensuchboot" could be written as "MINENSUCHBOOT", "MINBOOT", "MMMBOOT" or "MMM354"
Accessories.
Like any popular device, there were a large number of accessories for the Enigma (yes, this began already then).For example, there were auto-printing devices (in the usual version, coding was done by lighting bulbs, the values of which had to be written down by the operator).
In addition, there were remote printing devices (on wires, of course). So that the operator who enters an encrypted message into the machine does not have access to the decrypted one.
Based on materials from the dissertation “Encryption machines and decryption devices during the Second World War,” defended at the University of Chemnitz (Germany) in 2004.
Introduction. For the general public, the word “Enigma” (in Greek - a riddle) is synonymous with the concepts of “cipher machine” and “code breaking”, which has been taken care of by films about submarines and similar novels that have little to do with reality. Little is known to the general public about the fact that there were other encryption machines, for which special decryption machines were created to “break”, and about the consequences that this had in the Second World War.
And not surprisingly: there is too little information about this in popular publications. And the information available there is usually either insufficient or unreliable. This is all the more regrettable because the breaking of encryption codes was of extremely important historical significance for the course of the war, since the allies (in the anti-Hitler coalition), thanks to the information obtained in this way, had significant advantages, they were able to compensate for some omissions of the first half of the war and were able to optimally use their resources in the second half of the war. According to Anglo-American historians, if it had not been for the breaking of German encryption codes, the war would have lasted two years longer, additional casualties would have been required, and it is also possible that an atomic bomb would have been dropped on Germany.But we will not deal with this issue, but will limit ourselves to the scientific, technical and organizational circumstances that contributed to the disclosure of German encryption codes. And what is especially important is how and why it was possible to develop machine methods of “hacking” and use them successfully.
Hacking the Enigma codes and the codes of other encryption machines provided the allies with access not only to military-tactical information, but also to information from the Foreign Ministry, police, SS and railway. This also includes reports from the Axis countries, especially Japanese diplomacy, and the Italian army. The Allies also received information about internal position in Germany and its allies.
In England alone, a secret service team of thousands worked to decipher the codes. This work was personally supervised by the Prime Minister of England Winston Churchill, who knew about the importance of this work from the experience of the First World War, when he was the Secretary of the Navy of the British government. Already in November 1914, he ordered the deciphering of all intercepted enemy telegrams. He also ordered that previously intercepted telegrams be deciphered in order to understand the way of thinking German command. This is evidence of his foresight. The most famous result of this activity was forcing the US entry into the First World War.
Equally far-sighted was the creation of English listening stations - then a completely new idea - especially listening to the radio traffic of enemy ships.
Even then and in the period between the two world wars, Churchill equated such activities with a new type of weapon. Finally, it was clear that it was necessary to classify our own radio communications. And all this had to be kept secret from the enemy. There are great doubts that the leaders of the Third Reich realized all this. In the leadership of the Wehrmacht (OKW) there was a department with a small number of cryptologists and with the task of “developing methods for revealing enemy radio messages,” and we were talking about front-line radio reconnaissance officers, who were charged with providing front-line commanders with tactical information on their sector of the front. IN German army The encryption machines used were assessed not by cryptologists (based on encryption quality and cracking capabilities), but by technical specialists.
The Allies followed the gradual improvement of German encryption technology and also improved methods of breaking encryption codes. The Germans attributed facts indicating the awareness of the Allies to betrayal and espionage. In addition, in the Third Reich there was often no clear subordination, and the encryption services of different branches of the military not only did not interact with each other, but also hid their skills from the cryptographers of other branches of the military, since “competition” was the order of the day. The Germans did not try to unravel the Allied encryption codes, since they had few cryptologists for this, and those that they had worked in isolation from each other. The experience of English cryptologists has shown that the joint work of a large team of cryptologists made it possible to solve almost all the tasks assigned. Towards the end of the war, a gradual transition in the field of encryption began from machine-based work to computer-based work.
Encryption machines in military affairs were first used in Germany in 1926. This prompted potential opponents of Germany to join in the development own methods encryption and decryption. For example, Poland took up this issue, and first it had to develop the theoretical foundations of machine cryptology, since “manual” methods were not suitable for this. A future war would require thousands of radio messages to be deciphered every day. It was Polish specialists who were the first to begin work on machine cryptological analysis in 1930. After the outbreak of war and the occupation of Poland and France, this work was continued by English specialists. The theoretical work of the mathematician A. Turing was especially important here. Beginning in 1942, breaking encryption codes became extremely important, as the German command increasingly used radio communications to transmit its orders. It was necessary to develop completely new methods of cryptological analysis for decryption machines.
Historical reference.
Julius Caesar was the first to use text encryption. In the 9th century, the Arab scholar Al-Kindi first considered the problem of text decipherment. The work of Italian mathematicians of the 15th and 16th centuries was devoted to the development of encryption methods. The first mechanical device was invented in 1786 by a Swedish diplomat; such a device was also available American President Jefferson in 1795. Only in 1922 this device was improved by the American army cryptologist Mauborn. It was used to encrypt tactical messages until the outbreak of World War II. Patents for improving usability (but not for encryption security) were issued by the US Patent Office starting in 1915. All this was supposed to be used to encrypt business correspondence. Despite numerous improvements in devices, it was clear that only short text encryption was reliable.
At the end of the First World War and in the first years after it, several inventions appeared, created by amateurs for whom this was a kind of hobby. Let's name two of them: Hebern and Vernam, both Americans, neither of them, most likely, had ever heard of the science of cryptology. The latter of the two even implemented some operations of Boolean logic, which at that time few people knew about except professional mathematicians. Professional cryptologists began further improving these encryption machines, which made it possible to increase their security against hacking.
Since 1919 German designers also began to patent their developments; one of the first was the future inventor of the Enigma, Arthur Scherbius (1878 - 1929). Four variants of similar machines were developed, but there was no commercial interest in them, probably because the machines were expensive and difficult to maintain. Neither the Navy nor the Ministry of Foreign Affairs accepted the inventor's proposals, so he tried to offer his encryption machine to the civilian sectors of the economy. The army and the Foreign Ministry continued to use encryption using books.
Arthur Scherbius went to work for the company that bought his patent for an encryption machine. This company continued to improve Enigma even after the death of its author. In the second version (Enigma B), the machine was a modified electric typewriter, on one side it was equipped with an encryption device in the form of 4 replaceable rotors. The company widely displayed the machine and advertised it as unhackable. Reichswehr officers became interested in her. The fact is that in 1923, Churchill’s memoirs were published, in which he talked about his cryptological successes. This caused shock among the leadership of the German army. German officers learned that most of their military and diplomatic communications had been deciphered by British and French experts! And that this success was largely determined by the weakness of amateurish encryption, invented by amateur cryptologists, since German military cryptology simply did not exist. Naturally, they began to look for strong encryption methods for military communications. Therefore, they became interested in Enigma.
Enigma had several modifications: A, B, C, etc. Modification C could perform both encryption and decryption of messages; it did not require complex maintenance. But its products were not yet resistant to hacking, because the creators were not advised by professional cryptologists. It was used by the German Navy from 1926 to 1934. The next modification, Enigma D, was also a commercial success. Subsequently, since 1940, it was used in railway transport in the occupied areas of Eastern Europe.
In 1934 The German navy began to use another modification of Enigma I.
It is curious that Polish cryptologists tried to decrypt German radio messages classified by this machine, and the results of this work somehow became known to German intelligence. At first, the Poles were successful, but the German intelligence “watching” them reported this to their cryptologists, and they changed the codes. When it turned out that Polish cryptologists were unable to crack messages encrypted with Enigma -1, the ground forces, the Wehrmacht, also began to use this machine. After some improvement, it was this encryption machine that became the main one in the Second World War. Since 1942, the German submarine fleet adopted the Enigma-4 modification.
Gradually, by July 1944, control over the encryption business passed from the hands of the Wehrmacht to the roof of the SS, the main role here was played by competition between these branches of the armed forces. From the very first days of WWII, the armies of the USA, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Italy and other countries were saturated with encryption machines. In Germany, machine designs are constantly being improved. The main difficulty in this case was caused by the inability to find out whether the enemy was able to decipher texts encrypted by a given machine. Enigma different modifications was introduced at levels above the division, it continued to be produced after the war (model “Schlüsselkasten 43”) in Chemnitz: in October 1945. 1,000 pieces were produced in January 1946. - already 10,000 pieces!
Telegraph, historical information.
Appearance electric current caused rapid development telegraphy, which not coincidentally occurred in the 19th century in parallel with industrialization. The driving force was the railways, which used the telegraph for the needs of railway traffic, for which all kinds of devices such as pointers were developed. Steinhel's device appeared in 1836, and in 1840 it was developed by Samuel MORSE. Further improvements came in the form of the Siemens and Halske printing telegraph (Siemens & Halske, 1850), which converted received electrical impulses into readable type. And invented in 1855. The printing wheel, after a number of improvements, was still used by Hughes in the 20th century.
The next important invention for accelerating the transfer of information was created in 1867 by Wheatstone: punched tape with Morse code, which the device felt mechanically. Further development telegraphy was hampered underutilization wire throughput. The first attempt was made by B. Meyer in 1871, but it failed because the different lengths and number of pulses in Morse letters prevented it. But in 1874, the French engineer Emile Baudot managed to solve this problem. This solution became the standard for the next 100 years. Baudot's method had two important features. Firstly, it was the first step towards the use of binary calculus. And secondly, it was the first reliable multi-channel data transmission system.
The further development of telegraphy rested on the need to deliver telegrams using postmen. Another one was needed organizational system, which would include: a device in every home, its maintenance by special personnel, receiving telegrams without the help of personnel, constant connection to the line, issuing texts page by page. Such a device would have prospects of success only in the USA. In Europe, until 1929, the postal monopoly prevented the appearance of any private device for transmitting messages; they had to be installed only at the post office.
The first step in this direction was taken in 1901 by the Australian Donald Murray. In particular, he modified Baudot's code. This modification was the standard until 1931. He did not have commercial success, since he did not dare to patent his invention in the USA. In the USA, two American inventors competed with each other: Howard Krum and E.E. Kleinschmidt. Subsequently, they merged into one company in Chicago, which began producing equipment in 1024, which enjoyed commercial success. The German company Lorenz imported several of their machines, installed them in post offices and obtained a license for their production in Germany. Since 1929, the postal monopoly in Germany was abolished, and private individuals gained access to telegraph channels. Introduction in 1931 international standards on telegraph channels made it possible to organize telegraph communication with the whole world. The same devices began to be produced in 1927 by Siemens and Halske.
The first person to combine a telegraph with an encryption machine was 27-year-old American Gilbert Vernam, an employee of the ATT company. In 1918 he applied for a patent in which he empirically used Boolean algebra (which, by the way, he had no idea about and which was then being studied by several mathematicians around the world).
Made great contributions to cryptology American officer William Friedman, he made American encryption machines virtually unbreakable.
When telegraph devices from Siemens and Halske appeared in Germany, I became interested in them Navy Germany. But its leadership was still under the impression that the British had cracked the German codes and read their messages during the First World War. Therefore they demanded to connect telegraph apparatus with an encryption machine. This was a completely new idea at that time, because encryption in Germany was done manually and only then the encrypted texts were transmitted.
In the USA, this requirement was met by Vernam devices. In Germany, the company Siemens and Halske took on this work. They filed the first open patent on this topic in July 1930. By 1932 a workable device was created, which at first was freely sold, but since 1934. was classified. Since 1936 These devices began to be used in aviation, and since 1941. - and ground forces. Since 1942 Machine encryption of radio messages began.
The Germans continued to improve various models of encryption machines, but they put the improvement of the mechanical part in the first place, treating cryptology in an amateurish manner; manufacturing companies did not involve professional cryptologists for consultations. Of great importance for all these problems were the works of the American mathematician Claude Shannon, who was well-read since 1942. worked at Bell Laboratories and conducted secret research there mathematical research. Even before the war, he was famous for proving the analogy between Boolean algebra and relay connections in telephony. It was he who discovered the “bit” as a unit of information. After the war, in 1948. Shannon wrote his main work, The Mathematical Theory of Communications. After this he became a professor of mathematics at the university.
Shannon was the first to consider mathematical model cryptology and developed the analysis of encrypted texts using information-theoretical methods. The fundamental question of his theory is: “How much information does ciphertext contain compared to plaintext?” In 1949, he published the work “The Theory of Communications of Secret Systems,” in which he answered this question. The analysis carried out there was the first and only to quantify the strength of an encryption method. Post-war analysis showed that neither German nor Japanese encryption machines were unbreakable. In addition, there are other sources of information (for example, intelligence) that greatly simplify the decryption task.
England's position forced it to exchange long cipher texts with the United States; it was the great length that made deciphering them possible. In a special department of the British secret service M 16, a method was developed that increased the degree of secrecy of the message - ROCKEX. The American encryption method for the Foreign Office was broken by German experts and the corresponding messages were decrypted. Having learned about this, the United States in 1944. replaced an imperfect system with a more reliable one. Around the same time, the German Wehrmacht, Navy and Foreign Ministry also exchanged encryption technology for newly developed ones. Insufficient reliability was also noted Soviet methods encryption, because of which they were hacked by American services and many Soviet intelligence officers involved in espionage of the American atomic bomb were identified (Operation Venona - breaking).
Breaking into.
Now let's talk about the British HACKING German encryption machines, that is, the machine unraveling of the method of encrypting texts in them. . This work received the English name ULTRA. Non-machine decryption methods were too labor-intensive and unacceptable in war conditions. How were they arranged? English cars for decryption, without which the Allies could not have achieved an advantage over the German codebreakers? What information and textual material did they need? And was there a German mistake here, and if so, why did it happen?
First, the scientific and technical basics.
First, preliminary scientific work was carried out, since it was necessary, first of all, to analyze the algorithms cryptologically and mathematically. This was possible because encryption was widely used by the German Wehrmacht. Such analysis required not only ciphertexts obtained through eavesdropping, but also plaintexts obtained through espionage or theft. In addition, different texts were needed, encrypted in the same way. At the same time linguistic analysis the language of military men and diplomats. Given long texts, it became possible to mathematically establish an algorithm even for an unfamiliar cipher machine. Then they managed to reconstruct the car.
For this work, the British brought together approximately 10,000 people, including mathematicians, engineers, linguists, translators, military experts, and other employees to sort the data, check it, archive it, and maintain the machines. This association was called BP (Bletchley Park) and was under the personal control of Churchill. The information received turned out to be a powerful weapon in the hands of the Allies.
How did the British master the Wehrmacht Enigma? Poland was the first to decipher German codes. After the First World War, it was in constant military danger from both of its neighbors - Germany and the USSR, who dreamed of regaining the lands lost and transferred to Poland. To avoid surprises, the Poles recorded radio messages and deciphered them. They were greatly alarmed that after the introduction in February 1926. in the German Navy Enigma C, as well as after its introduction in the ground forces in July 1928. they were unable to decipher messages encrypted by this machine.
Then the BS4 department of the Polish General Staff assumed that the Germans had acquired machine encryption, especially since they knew the early commercial versions of Enigma. Polish intelligence confirmed that in the Wehrmacht from June 1, 1930. Enigma 1 is used. Polish military experts were unable to decipher German messages. Even having received Enigma documents through their agents, they could not achieve success. They concluded that there was a lack of scientific knowledge. Then they commissioned three mathematicians, one of whom studied in Göttingen, to create a system of analysis. All three received additional training at the University of Poznan and spoke fluent German. They managed to reproduce the Enigma device and create a copy of it in Warsaw. Let us note the outstanding achievements of one of them, the Polish mathematician M. Rejewski (1905 - 1980). Although the Wehrmacht constantly improved the encryption of its messages, Polish specialists succeeded until January 1, 1939. decipher them. After this, the Poles began to cooperate with the allies, to whom they had not previously communicated anything. Such cooperation was already advisable in view of the obvious military danger. July 25, 1939 they conveyed to the English and French representatives all the information they knew. On August 16 of the same year, the Polish “gift” reached England, and English experts from the newly created VR transcription center began to work with him.
British cryptologists were reduced after the First World War, remaining only under the roof of the Foreign Office. During the war in Spain, the Germans used Enigma D, and the remaining English cryptologists, under the leadership of the outstanding philologist Alfred Dillwyn (1885-1943), continued to work on deciphering German messages. But clean mathematical methods it wasn't enough. By this time, at the end of 1938. among visitors English courses Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing turned out to train cryptographers. He took part in the attacks on Enigma 1. He created an analysis model known as the “Turing machine”, which made it possible to assert that a decryption algorithm definitely exists, all that remained was to discover it!
Thüring was included in the BP as a person liable for military service. By May 1, 1940 he achieved serious success: he took advantage of the fact that every day at 6 o'clock in the morning the German weather service transmitted an encrypted weather forecast. It is clear that it necessarily contained the word "wetter" (Wetter), and that the strict rules of German grammar determined its exact position in the sentence. This allowed him to ultimately come to a solution to the problem of breaking the Enigma, and he created an electromechanical device for this. The idea came to him in early 1940, and in May of the same year, with the help of a group of engineers, such a device was created. The task of decoding was made easier by the fact that the language of German radio messages was simple, expressions and individual words repeated often. German officers did not know the basics of cryptology, considering it unimportant.
The British military, and especially Churchill personally, demanded constant attention to deciphering messages. Since the summer of 1940 The British deciphered all messages encrypted using Enigma. Nevertheless, English specialists were constantly improving decryption technology. By the end of the war, British codebreakers had 211 decryption devices working around the clock. They were served by 265 mechanics, and 1,675 women were brought on duty. The work of the creators of these machines was appreciated many years later, when they tried to recreate one of them: due to the lack of necessary personnel at that time, the work on recreating the famous machine lasted several years and remained unfinished!
The instructions for creating decryption devices created by Dühring at that time were banned until 1996... Among the means of decryption was the method of “forced” information: for example, British planes destroyed the pier in the port of Calle, knowing in advance that the German services would report this with a set of information known in advance to the British words! In addition, German services transmitted this message many times, each time encoding it with different codes, but word for word...
Finally, the most important front for England was the submarine war, where the Germans used a new modification of the Enigma M3. The British fleet was able to remove such a vehicle from a captured German submarine. On February 1, 1942, the German Navy switched to using the M4 model. But some German messages, encrypted in the old way, mistakenly contained information about the design features of this new car. This made the task much easier for Thuring's team. Already in December 1942. Enigma M4 was cracked. On December 13, 1942, the British Admiralty received precise data on the location of 12 German submarines in the Atlantic...
According to Turing, to speed up decryption it was necessary to switch to the use of electronics, since electromechanical relay devices did not perform this procedure quickly enough. On November 7, 1942, Turing went to the United States, where, together with a team from Bell Laboratories, he created an apparatus for top-secret negotiations between Churchill and Roosevelt. At the same time, under his leadership, American decryption machines were improved, so that Enigma M4 was finally cracked and until the end of the war it provided the British and Americans with comprehensive intelligence information. Only in November 1944 did the German command have doubts about the reliability of its encryption technology, but this did not lead to any measures...
(Translator's note: Since, starting from 1943, the head of British counterintelligence was the Soviet intelligence officer Kim Philby, all information immediately came to the USSR! Some of this information was transmitted to the Soviet Union both officially through the British bureau in Moscow, and also semi-officially through the Soviet resident in Switzerland, Alexander Rado.)
Chiffriermaschinen und Entzifferungsgeräte
im Zweiten Weltkrieg:
Technikgeschichte und informatikhistorische Aspekte
Von der Philosophischen Fakultät der Technischen Universität Chemnitz genehmigte
Dissertation
zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades doctor philosophiae (Dr.phil.)
von Dipl.-Ing.Michael Pröse
As we remember, story line The film "From Russia with Love" revolved around a decoder, with the help of which access to Soviet state secrets was opened. What was James Bond hunting for and was it worth it?
Cunning Herodotus
From time immemorial, the success of many military operations depended on the accuracy and timeliness of information about the enemy. Therefore, the quality of intelligence (read “espionage”) has always been placed at the forefront. To protect against interception, important information must be properly encrypted. The best minds have always been dedicated to solving this problem. For example, Caesar used a specific cipher for secret correspondence: each character of the message was replaced by another, spaced from it by a certain number of positions in the alphabet.
Another ancient genius, Herodotus, was much more inventive in his cryptographic research. One day he created a secret message in the form of a tattoo on the shaved head of a slave. The bald spot was covered with fresh hair growth, under which the message was not visible. It was there - in the homeland of Herodotus - that perhaps the first spy gadget was invented - the wanderer. It was a stick that was used for permutation encryption (about the same thing that Caesar did).
Over time, spy cars became more and more intricate and original. In the Middle Ages, various devices were actively invented by the Inquisition, in the Age of Enlightenment and in Modern times - by learned men. The purpose of their inventions, such as the Jefferson Cipher, was far from military affairs. Although many of the developments subsequently found their application in the encryption machines of intelligence services in many countries around the world.
RIDDLES AND PUZZLES
Appearance of the Enigma encryption machine.
The heyday of various mechanical encryptors/decryptors occurred during the era of the greatest wars in terms of scale - the beginning of the twentieth century. The development of such machines was carried out from with varying success and in European countries (primarily in England and Germany), and in the USA, and in Soviet Russia. Enigma, the development of German engineers, gained the greatest popularity.
The machine is not named after its inventor - there is a word that in translation means “riddle”. And Arthur Sherbius invented and patented this machine. At different times, four options were developed and patented, but none received commercial success due to the high cost. Scherbius did not give up and went to work in the office, which bought the patent for the invention from him. Arthur did not live to see the triumph of his brainchild. Several years passed before, through the efforts of engineers, Enigma began to arouse the interest of various structures. First of all, Reichswehr officers became interested in her. Die is cast…
Modifications
Scheme of the Enigma encryption machine.
Through the efforts of Wehrmacht specialists, Enigma was constantly improved and went through several modifications: A, B, C, etc. One of the simplest options - modification B - was a kind of electric typewriter. It consisted of a combination of mechanical and electrical systems. The mechanical part is a QWERTY keyboard, a set of rotating rotors located along the shaft. The rotors were driven by a step mechanism when one or another key was pressed. The specific mechanism of operation could vary from modification to modification, but in general terms it was like this.
The mechanical parts of the unit moved, forming a changing electrical circuit. That is, the encryption of letters was carried out electrically. Each time a key was pressed, the rightmost rotor moved one position, and under certain conditions, the other rotors also moved. Their movements resulted in different cryptographic transformations with each subsequent keystroke on the keyboard. Constant change electrical circuit due to the rotation of the rotors, it made it possible to implement a multi-alphabetic substitution cipher. For example, the contact representing the letter E could be connected to the contact of the letter T on the other side of the rotor. But when using several rotors in a bunch (3-4), due to their constant movement, the encryption was more reliable.
For every cunning cipher there is always...
“Peace to all!” said Winston Churchill and challenged the best minds in Great Britain to decipher the Enigma code.
Having noticed Germany's encryption activity, potential adversaries began taking countermeasures. For example, in Poland they started with the theoretical foundations of machine cryptology and slowly practiced decryption. After the unconditional defeat of Poland, France took the lead in these endeavors. Which, as we remember, was also occupied. Therefore, the cunning British acted as successors and succeeded in deciphering good results. They started with detailed cryptological and mathematical analysis. For this, both the encryption itself and ready-made decrypted texts were needed. At the next stage, the British recruited a whole army of experts in various fields: linguistics, mathematics, mechanics - in total, according to various sources, up to 10,000 people. The entire painstaking process of work was personally supervised by Winston Churchill, who understood the importance of this kind of work back in 1914.
The decryption process went much faster when Alan Turing joined the cryptographer team. He created an analysis model called the “Turing machine”. Alan was the first to think of carefully listening to the encrypted weather reports every morning. They necessarily contained the word “weather” (Wetter), which was strictly certain place sentences according to the rules of German grammar. Plus, many factors played into the hands of cryptologists: mistakes of German operators, seizures of copies of Enigma and code books... In short, from the beginning of the summer of 1940, the British deciphered all messages transmitted using Enigma. There is an opinion that without such success the Second World War could have lasted a couple of years longer. Although it is possible that the British are exaggerating their contribution. A typewriter is a typewriter, but no one has yet canceled the significance of the Second Front...
The German cipher machine was called “Riddle” not for the sake of words. There are legends surrounding the history of its capture and decoding of radio interceptions, and cinema largely contributes to this. Myths and truth about the German encoder are in our material.
It is known that the enemy's interception of messages can only be countered by their reliable protection or encryption. The history of encryption goes back centuries - one of the most famous ciphers is called the Caesar cipher. Then attempts were made to mechanize the process of encryption and decryption: the Alberti disk has reached us, created in the 60s of the 15th century by Leon Battista Alberti, the author of the “Treatise on Ciphers” - one of the first books on the art of encryption and decryption.
The Enigma machine used by Germany during World War II was not unique. But it differed from similar devices adopted by other countries in its relative simplicity and widespread use: it could be used almost everywhere - both in the field and on a submarine. The history of Enigma dates back to 1917 - then the Dutchman Hugo Koch received a patent for it. Her job was to replace some letters with others using rotating rollers.
We know the history of decoding the Enigma machine mainly from Hollywood blockbusters about submarines. However, these films, according to historians, have little in common with reality.
For example, the 2000 film U-571 tells the story of a secret mission by American sailors to capture an Enigma encryption machine aboard the German submarine U-571. The action takes place in 1942 in the North Atlantic. Despite the fact that the film is notable for its entertainment, the story told in it does not answer at all historical facts. The submarine U-571 was actually in service with Nazi Germany, but was sunk in 1944, and the Americans managed to capture the Enigma machine only at the very end of the war, and this did not play a serious role in the approach of Victory. By the way, at the end of the film the creators report historically correct facts about the capture of the encoder, but they appeared at the insistence of the film’s consultant, an Englishman by birth. On the other hand, the film's director, Jonathan Mostow, said that his film "is a work of art."
European films try to maintain historical accuracy, but some fiction is also present in them. Michael Apted's 2001 film Enigma tells the story of mathematician Tom Jericho, who must solve the updated code of a German cipher machine in just four days. Of course, in real life it took much longer to decipher the codes. At first, this was done by the Polish cryptological service. And a group of mathematicians - Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozicki - studying disused German ciphers, found that the so-called day code, which was changed every day, consisted of the settings of the switchboard, the order of installation of the rotors, the positions of the rings and the initial settings of the rotor . This happened in 1939, even before the capture of Poland by Nazi Germany. Also, the Polish “Bureau of Ciphers,” created specifically to “fight” Enigma, had at its disposal several copies of a working machine, as well as an electromechanical Bomba machine, which consisted of six paired German devices, which helped in working with codes. It was she who later became the prototype for Bombe, the invention of Alan Turing.
The Polish side was able to transfer its developments to the British intelligence services, which organized further work on cracking the “riddle”. By the way, the British first became interested in Enigma back in the mid-20s, however, they quickly abandoned the idea of deciphering the code, apparently considering that it was impossible to do so. However, with the beginning of World War II, the situation changed: largely thanks to the mysterious machine, Germany controlled half of the Atlantic and sank European convoys with food and ammunition. Under these conditions, Great Britain and other countries of the anti-Hitler coalition definitely needed to penetrate the Enigma riddle.
Sir Alistair Dennison, head of the State Code and Cipher School, which was located in the huge Bletchley Park castle 50 miles from London, conceived and carried out secret operation Ultra, turning to talented graduates of Cambridge and Oxford, among whom was the famous cryptographer and mathematician Alan Turing. Turing's work on breaking the Enigma machine codes is the subject of the 2014 film The Imitation Game. Back in 1936, Turing developed an abstract computing “Turing machine”, which can be considered a model of a computer - a device capable of solving any problem presented in the form of a program - a sequence of actions. At the code and cipher school, he headed the Hut 8 group, responsible for the cryptanalysis of German Navy communications, and developed a number of methods for breaking the German encryptor. In addition to Turing's group, 12 thousand employees worked at Bletchley Park. It was thanks to their hard work that the Enigma codes could be deciphered, but it was not possible to crack all the ciphers. For example, the Triton cipher worked successfully for about a year, and even when the “guys from Bletchley” cracked it, it did not bring desired result, since too much time passed from the moment the encryption was intercepted to the transfer of information to the British sailors.
The thing is that, by order of Winston Churchill, all decryption materials were received only by the heads of the intelligence services and Sir Stuart Menzies, who headed MI6. Such precautions were taken so that the Germans would not realize that the codes had been broken. At the same time, these measures did not always work, then the Germans changed the Enigma settings, after which the decryption work began anew.
The Imitation Game also touches on the topic of the relationship between British and Soviet cryptographers. Official London really was not confident in the competence of specialists from Soviet Union, however, by personal order of Winston Churchill, on July 24, 1941, materials with the Ultra stamp began to be transferred to Moscow. True, to exclude the possibility of disclosing not only the source of information, but also that Moscow would learn about the existence of Bletchley Park, all materials were disguised as intelligence information. However, the USSR learned about the work on deciphering Enigma back in 1939, and three years later, the Soviet spy John Cairncross entered the service of the State School of Codes and Ciphers, who regularly sent all the necessary information to Moscow.
Many people wonder why the USSR did not decipher the radio interceptions of the German “Riddle”, although Soviet troops captured two such devices back in 1941, and in Battle of Stalingrad Moscow had three more devices at its disposal. According to historians, the lack of modern electronic equipment in the USSR at that time had an impact.
By the way, special department The Cheka, which deals with encryption and decryption, was convened in the USSR on May 5, 1921. For obvious reasons - the department worked for intelligence and counterintelligence - there were not very many advertised victories to the credit of the department's employees. For example, the disclosure of diplomatic codes of a number of countries already in the twenties. They also created their own cipher - the famous “Russian code”, which, as they say, no one was able to decipher.
Wars are fought with weapons. However, only weapons are not enough. The one who has the information wins! You need to receive other people's information and protect your own. This special type of struggle is ongoing.
The ancient Egyptians protected their secrets with hieroglyphic ciphers, the Romans with the Caesar cipher, the Venetians with Alberti's cipher disks. With the development of technology, the flow of information increased, and manual encryption became a serious burden, and did not provide adequate reliability. Encryption machines appeared. The most famous among them is Enigma, which became widespread in Nazi Germany. In fact, Enigma is a whole family of 60 electromechanical rotary encryption devices that worked in the first half of the 20th century in commercial structures, armies and services of many countries. A number of books and films such as the Hollywood blockbuster "Enigma" introduced us to the German military "Enigma" (Enigma Wehrmacht). She has a bad reputation because English cryptanalysts were able to read her messages, and this backfired on the Nazis.
This story contained brilliant ideas, unique technological achievements, complex military operations, disregard for human lives, courage, and betrayal. She showed how the ability to anticipate enemy actions neutralizes the brute force of a weapon.
The appearance of "Riddle"
In 1917, the Dutchman Koch patented an electric rotary encryption device for protecting commercial information. In 1918, the German Scherbius bought this patent, modified it and built the Enigma encryption machine (from the Greek ανιγμα - “riddle”). Having created the company Chiffriermaschinen AG, the businessman from Berlin began to increase demand for his not yet secret new product, exhibiting it in 1923 at the international postal congress in Bern, and a year later in Stockholm. The “riddle” was advertised in the German press, radio, and the Austrian Institute of Criminology, but there were almost no people willing to buy it - it was too expensive. Custom Enigmas went to Sweden, the Netherlands, Japan, Italy, Spain, and the USA. In 1924, the British took the car, registered it in their patent office, and their cryptographic service (Room 40) looked into its insides.
And they are simple. This is a kind of electric typewriter: 26 letter keyboard Latin alphabet, a register with 26 light bulbs with letters, a switchboard, a 4.5 volt battery, a coding system in the form of rotors with encryption disks (3-4 working ones plus 0-8 replaceable ones). The rotors are connected to each other like the gears in an odometer (car odometer). But here, unlike the odometer, the rightmost disk, when entering a letter, rotates by a variable step, the value of which is set according to a schedule. Having made a full revolution, it transfers the turn by step to the next rotor, etc. The right disk is the fastest, and the gear ratio is variable, i.e., the commutation scheme changes with each letter entered (the same letter is encrypted by differently). The rotors are marked with an alphabet, which allows you to change their initial setting according to pre-agreed rules. The highlight of the Enigma is the reflector, a statically fixed rotor, which, having received a signal from the rotating rotors, sends it back and in a 3-rotor machine the signal is converted 7 times.
The operator works like this: presses the key with the next letter of the encrypted message - the light bulb on the register lights up, corresponding (only at the moment!) to this letter - the operator, seeing the letter on the light bulb, enters it into the encryption text. He does not need to understand the encryption process; it is done completely automatically. The output is complete nonsense, which is sent as a radiogram to the addressee. It can only be read by “one of our own”, who has a synchronously configured “Enigma”, i.e., who knows which rotors and in what order are used for encryption; his machine also decrypts the message automatically, in reverse order.
“Riddle” dramatically speeded up the communication process, eliminating the use of tables, cipher notebooks, transcoding logs, long hours of painstaking work, and inevitable errors.
From a mathematical point of view, such encryption is the result of permutations that cannot be tracked without knowing the starting position of the rotors. The encryption function E of the simplest 3-rotor Enigma is expressed by the formula E = P (pi Rp-i) (pj Mp-j) (pk Lp-k)U (pk L-1 p-k) (pj M-1 p-j) ( pi R-1 p-i) P-1, where P is the patch panel, U is the reflector, L, M, R are the actions of the three rotors, the middle and left rotor are j and k rotations of M and L. After each key press, the transformation changes .
For its time, Enigma was quite simple and reliable. Its appearance did not puzzle any of Germany’s possible opponents, except Polish intelligence. The German military and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ignoring the new product, continued to work manually (ADFGX method, code books).
And then in 1923, the British Admiralty released The History of the First World War, telling the world about its advantage in that war thanks to breaking the German code. In 1914, the Russians, after sinking the German cruiser Magdeburg, fished out the corpse of an officer clutching a naval code magazine to his chest. The find was shared with their ally England.
German military elite, having experienced shock and analyzed the course of hostilities after that incident, concluded that such a fatal leak of information should not be allowed in the future. “Enigma” immediately became in demand, was purchased en masse by the military, and disappeared from public sale. And when Hitler began to prepare a new war, the encryption miracle became a mandatory program. Increasing the security of communications, designers constantly added new elements to the machine. Even in the first 3-rotor model, each letter has 17,576 variations (26x26x26). When using 3 working rotors out of 5 included in the kit in a random order, the number of options is already 1054560. Adding a 4th working rotor complicates encryption by orders of magnitude; When using replaceable rotors, the number of options is already measured in the billions. This convinced the German military.
Blitzkrieg weapon
Enigma is just one type of electromechanical disk encoder. But here is its mass character... From 1925 until the end of World War II, about 100 thousand cars were produced.
This is the whole point: the encryption technology of other countries was piecemeal, working in the special services, behind closed doors. "Enigma" - a blitzkrieg weapon - fought in the field at levels above the division, on board a bomber, ship, submarine; was in every port, on every major railway. stations, in every SS brigade, every Gestapo headquarters. Quantity has turned into quality. The device is not too complicated dangerous weapon, and the fight against it was fundamentally more important than intercepting individual, even very secret, but still not mass correspondence. Compact compared to foreign analogues the car could be quickly destroyed in case of danger.
The first - Model A - was large, heavy (65x45x35 cm, 50 kg), similar to a cash register. Model B already looked like an ordinary typewriter. The reflector appeared in 1926 on the truly portable Model C (28x34x15 cm, 12 kg). These were commercial devices with encryption without much resistance to hacking, and there was no interest in them. It appeared in 1927 with the D model, which later worked on railway and in the occupied Eastern Europe. In 1928, Enigma G, aka Enigma I, aka “Wehrmacht Enigma” appeared; having a patch panel, it was distinguished by enhanced cryptographic resistance and worked in the ground forces and air force.
But the German Navy was the first to use Enigma. It was a 1925 Funkschlüssel C model. In 1934, the Navy adopted a naval modification of the army vehicle (Funkschlüssel M or M3). At that time, the army used only 3 rotors, and in the M3, for greater safety, you could choose 3 rotors out of 5. In 1938, 2 more rotors were added to the kit, in 1939, 1 more, so it became possible to choose 3 out of 8 rotors. And in February 1942, the German submarine fleet was equipped with a 4-rotor M4. Portability was preserved: the reflector and the 4th rotor were thinner than usual. Among the mass-produced Enigmas, the M4 was the most secure. It had a printer (Schreibmax) in the form of a remote panel in the commander's cabin, and the signalman worked with encrypted text, without access to classified data.
But there was also special, special equipment. Abwehr ( military intelligence) used a 4-rotor Enigma G. The level of encryption was so high that other German authorities could not read it. For the sake of portability (27x25x16 cm), the Abwehr abandoned the patch panel. As a result, the British managed to hack the machine's security, which greatly complicated the work of German agents in Britain. “Enigma T” (“Tirpitz machine”) was created specifically for communication with its ally Japan. With 8 rotors, reliability was very high, but the machine was hardly used. Based on the M4, they developed the M5 model with a set of 12 rotors (4 working/8 replaceable). And the M10 had a printer for open/closed texts. Both machines had another innovation - a gap-filling rotor, which greatly increased the strength of the encryption. The Army and Air Force encrypted messages in groups of 5 characters, the Navy - in groups of 4 characters. To make it more difficult to decrypt enemy interceptions, the texts contained no more than 250 characters; long ones were broken into parts and encrypted with different keys. To increase security, the text was clogged with “garbage” (“letter salad”). It was planned to rearm all types of troops with M5 and M10 in the summer of 1945, but time ran out.
"Rejewski's Bomb"
So, the neighbors were “blind” to Germany’s military preparations. The Germans' radio communication activity increased many times over, and it became impossible to decipher the interceptions. The Poles were the first to be alarmed. While keeping an eye on their dangerous neighbor, in February 1926, they suddenly could not read the encryption of the German Navy, and since July 1928, the encryption of the Reichswehr. It became clear: they switched to machine encryption. In January 29th, Warsaw customs found a “lost” parcel. Berlin's harsh request to return it attracted attention to the box. There was a commercial Enigma. Only after studying it was given to the Germans, but this did not help reveal their tricks, and they already had a reinforced version of the machine. Especially to combat Enigma, Polish military intelligence created the Cipher Bureau of the best mathematicians who spoke fluent German. They were lucky only after 4 years of marking time. Luck came in the form of an officer of the German Ministry of Defense, “bought” in 1931 by the French. Hans-Thilo Schmidt (“Agent Asche”), responsible for the destruction of outdated codes of the then 3-rotor Enigma, sold them to the French. I also got them instructions for it. The bankrupt aristocrat needed money and was offended by his homeland, which did not appreciate his services in the First World War. French and British intelligence showed no interest in this data and handed it over to their Polish allies. In 1932, the talented mathematician Marian Rejewski and his team cracked the miracle machine: “Ashe’s documents became manna from heaven: all the doors instantly opened.” France supplied the Poles with agent information until the war, and they managed to create an Enigma simulator, calling it a “bomb” (a type of ice cream popular in Poland). Its core was 6 Enigmas connected into a network, capable of sorting through all 17,576 positions of three rotors in 2 hours, i.e., all possible options key Her strength was enough to open the keys of the Reichswehr and the Air Force, but she could not split the keys of the Navy. The “bombs” were made by the company AVA Wytwurnia Radiotechniczna (it was the company that reproduced the German “Enigma” in 1933 - 70 pieces!). 37 days before the start of World War II, the Poles passed on their knowledge to the allies, giving them one “bomb” each. The French, crushed by the Wehrmacht, lost their car, but the British turned theirs into a more advanced cyclometer machine, which became the main instrument of the Ultra program. This counter-Enigma program was Britain's best-kept secret. The messages decrypted here were classified as Ultra, which is higher than Top secret.
Bletchley Park: Station X
After World War I, the British cut their cryptologists. The war with the Nazis began - and all forces had to be urgently mobilized. In August 1939, a group of code-breaking specialists entered the Bletchley Park estate, 50 miles from London, under the guise of a company of hunters. Here, at the decryption center Station X, which was under the personal control of Churchill, all information from radio interception stations in Great Britain and abroad converged. The company "British Tabulating Machines" built here the first decoding machine "Turing bomb" (this was the main British cracker), the core of which was 108 electromagnetic drums. She tried all the options for the cipher key given the known structure of the message being deciphered or part of the plaintext. Each drum, rotating at a speed of 120 revolutions per minute, tested 26 letter options in one full revolution. During operation, the machine (3.0 x2.1 x0.61 m, weight 1 t) ticked like a clockwork, which confirmed its name. For the first time in history, ciphers created en masse by a machine were also solved by the machine.
"Enigma" auf U-Boot U-124
To work, it was necessary to know the physical principles of the Enigma down to the smallest detail, and the Germans constantly changed it. The British command set the task: to obtain new copies of the machine at all costs. A targeted hunt began. First, they took a Luftwaffe Enigma with a set of keys from a Junkers shot down in Norway. The Wehrmacht, smashing France, advanced so quickly that one signal company overtook its own and was captured. The Enigma collection was replenished by the army. They were dealt with quickly: Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe encryption began to appear on the table of the British headquarters almost simultaneously with the German one. The most complex one was desperately needed - the naval M3. Why? The main front for the British was the sea front. Hitler tried to strangle them with a blockade, cutting off the supply of food, raw materials, fuel, equipment, and ammunition to the island country. Its weapon was the Reich's submarine fleet. The group tactics of the “wolf packs” terrified the Anglo-Saxons, their losses were enormous. They knew about the existence of the M3: 2 rotors were captured on the submarine U-33, and instructions for it were captured on the U-13. During a commando raid on the Lofoten Islands (Norway) on board the German patrol ship "Crab" they captured 2 rotors from the M3 and keys for February, the Germans managed to drown the car. Moreover, it turned out quite by accident that there were German non-military ships sailing in the Atlantic, which had special communications on board. Thus, the Royal Navy destroyer Griffin inspected the allegedly Dutch fishing vessel Polaris off the coast of Norway. The crew, consisting of strong guys, managed to throw two bags overboard, and the British caught one of them. There were documents for the encryption device.
Moreover, during the war international exchange the weather data stopped - and converted “fishermen” went from the Reich to the ocean. On board they had Enigma and settings for every day for 2-3 months, depending on the duration of the voyage. They regularly reported the weather and were easy to find. Special Royal Navy task forces came out to intercept the “meteorologists.” Fast destroyers literally took the enemy to task. By shooting, they tried not to sink the “German”, but to drive his crew into panic and prevent the destruction of special equipment. On May 7, 1941, the trawler Munich was intercepted, but the radio operator managed to throw the Enigma and May keys overboard. But in the captain’s safe they found the keys for June, a short-range communication code book, a coded weather log and a Navy coordinate grid. To conceal the capture, the English press wrote: “Our ships, in a battle with the German Munich, captured its crew, who abandoned the ship, sinking it.” The mining helped: the time from intercepting a message to decrypting it was reduced from 11 days to 4 hours! But the keys had expired and new ones were needed.
Captain Lemp's mistake
Surrender of the German submarine U-110 to the British. May 9, 1941
The main catch was made on May 8, 1941 during the capture of the submarine U-110 of Lieutenant Commander Julius Lemp, which was attacking convoy OV-318. After bombing U-110, the escort vessels forced her to surface. The captain of the destroyer HMS Bulldog went to ram, but, seeing that the Germans were jumping overboard in panic, he turned away in time. Having penetrated the half-submerged boat, the boarding party discovered that the team had not even tried to destroy the secret communications means. At this time, another ship picked up the surviving Germans from the water and locked them in the hold to hide what was happening. This was very important.
On the U-110 they took: a working Enigma M3, a set of rotors, keys for April-June, encryption instructions, radiograms, magazines ( personnel, navigation, signaling, radio communications), nautical charts, diagrams of minefields in the North Sea and off the coast of France, operating instructions for type IXB boats. The booty was compared to the victory in the Battle of Trafalgar, experts called it a “gift from heaven.” King George VI himself presented the awards to the sailors: “You deserve more, but now I can’t do it” (through the award system, German agents could have discovered the fact of the loss of the car). A subscription was taken from everyone; the capture of U-110 was not disclosed until 1958.
The gutted boat was sunk to maintain secrecy. Captain Lemp died. Interrogation of the remaining Germans revealed that they did not know about the loss of the secret. Just in case, measures were taken to disinformation, in front of the prisoners they lamented and regretted: “It was not possible to land on the boat, it suddenly sank.” For the sake of secrecy, they even coded her capture: “Operation Primrose.” Shocked by the success, First Sea Lord Pound radioed: “My heartiest congratulations. Your flower is of rare beauty.”
Trophies from U-110 brought a lot of benefits. Having received fresh information, the Bletchley Park hackers began regularly reading the communications between the headquarters of the Reich submarine forces and boats in the ocean, splitting most of the messages protected by the Hydra code. This helped break other Navy codes: "Neptune" (for heavy ships), "Zuid" and "Medusa" (for Mediterranean Sea) etc. It was possible to defeat the German network of reconnaissance and supply ships in the Atlantic submarine fleet(“cash cows”). The operational intelligence center learned the details of the Germans' coastal navigation, mining schemes for coastal waters, the timing of submarine raids, etc. Sea convoys began to bypass the “wolf packs”: from June to August, the “Doenitz wolves” found only 4% of convoys in the Atlantic, from September until December - 18%. But the Germans, believing that U-110 had taken its secret into the abyss, did not change the communication system. Admiral Doenitz: “Lemp did his duty and died as a hero.” However, after the publication of Roskill’s book “The Secret Capture” in 1959, the hero became, in the eyes of German veterans, a scoundrel who had tarnished his honor: “He did not carry out the order to destroy secret materials! Hundreds of our boats were sunk, thousands of submariners died in vain,” “if he had not died at the hands of the British, we should have shot him.”
And in February 1942, the 4-rotor M4 replaced the 3-rotor M3 on boats. Bletchley Park has hit a wall again. All that remained was to hope for the capture of a new vehicle, which happened on October 30, 1942. On this day, Captain-Lieutenant Heidtmann's U-559 northeast of Port Said was heavily damaged by British depth charges. Seeing that the boat was sinking, the crew jumped overboard without destroying the encryption equipment. She was found by sailors from the destroyer Petard. As soon as they handed over the loot to the boarding party that arrived in time, the mangled boat suddenly capsized, and two daredevils (Colin Grazier, Antony Fasson) went with it to a kilometer depth.
The spoils were the M4 and the "Brief Call Sign Log"/"Brief Weather Code" brochures, printed with soluble ink on pink blotting paper, which the radio operator was supposed to throw into the water at the first sign of danger. It was with their help that on December 13, 1942, the codes were opened, which immediately gave the headquarters accurate data on the positions of 12 German boats. After a 9-month break (black-out), the reading of ciphergrams began again, which did not stop until the end of the war. From now on, the destruction of the “wolf packs” in the Atlantic was only a matter of time.
Immediately after rising from the water, German submariners were completely undressed and all their clothes were taken away in order to search for documents of interest to intelligence (for example, code tables of the Enigma cipher machine).
A whole technology for such operations has been developed. Bombs were used to force the boat to the surface and they began shelling with machine guns so that the Germans, remaining on board, would not begin to sink. Meanwhile, a boarding party was approaching her, aiming to look for “something like a typewriter next to the radio station,” “disks with a diameter of 6 inches,” any magazines, books, papers. It was necessary to act quickly, and this was not always possible. Often people died without obtaining anything new.
In total, the British captured 170 Enigmas, including 3-4 naval M4s. This made it possible to speed up the decryption process. When 60 “bombs” were turned on simultaneously (i.e., 60 sets of 108 reels), the search for a solution was reduced from 6 hours to 6 minutes. This already made it possible to quickly respond to uncovered information. At the peak of the war, 211 “bombs” operated around the clock, reading up to 3 thousand German encryption messages daily. They were served in shifts by 1,675 female operators and 265 mechanics.
When Station X could no longer cope with the huge flow of radio interceptions, some of the work was moved to the United States. By the spring of 1944, 96 “Turing bombs” were working there, and a whole decryption factory had arisen. In the American model, with its 2000 rpm, the decoding was 15 times faster. Confrontation with the M4 has become a chore. Actually, this was the end of the fight with Enigma.
Consequences
Hacking the Enigma codes provided the Anglo-Saxons with access to almost all the secret information of the Third Reich (all armed forces, SS, SD, Foreign Ministry, post office, transport, economy), gave great strategic advantages, and helped them win victories with little bloodshed.
"Battle of Britain" (1940): Having difficulty repelling the German air pressure, in April the British began reading Luftwaffe radiograms. This helped them to properly operate their last reserves, and they won the battle. Without breaking Enigma, a German invasion of England would have been very likely.
“Battle of the Atlantic” (1939-1945): not taking the enemy from the air, Hitler strangled him with a blockade. In 1942, 1,006 ships with a displacement of 5.5 million gross tons were sunk. It seemed that just a little more and Britain would fall to its knees. But the British, reading the coded communications of the “wolves,” began to mercilessly drown them and won the battle.
Operation Overlord (1945): before the landing in Normandy, the Allies knew from the transcript about ALL German countermeasures to repel the landing, every day they received accurate data on positions and defense forces.
The Germans constantly improved Enigma. Operators were trained to destroy it in case of danger. During the war, the keys were changed every 8 hours. Cipher documents dissolved in water. The creators of the “Riddle” were also right: it is in principle impossible to decipher its messages manually. What if the enemy opposes this machine with his own? But that’s what he did; Capturing new copies of technology, he improved his “anti-Enigma”.
The Germans themselves made his work easier. So, they had an “indicator procedure”: at the beginning of the ciphergram, the setting was sent twice (rotor number / their starting positions), where a natural similarity was visible between the 1st and 4th, 2nd and 5th, 3rd and 6 characters. The Poles noticed this back in 1932 and cracked the code. A significant security hole was the weather reports. Submariners received them from the base “reliably” encrypted. On land, the same data was encrypted in the usual way - and now in the hands of crackers there is already a set of known combinations, and it is already clear which rotors work, how the key is built. Deciphering was facilitated by the standard language of messages, where expressions and words were often repeated. So, every day at 6:00 the weather service gave an encrypted forecast. The word "weather" was mandatory, and the clumsy German grammar put it in its exact place in the sentence. Also: the Germans often used the words “Vaterland” and “Reich”. The British had employees with native German language ( native speakers). Putting themselves in the place of the enemy coder, they searched through a lot of encryption for the presence of these words - and brought the victory over Enigma closer. It also helped that at the beginning of the session the radio operator always indicated the call sign of the boat. Knowing all their call signs, the British determined the rotor scheme, obtaining approximate cipher combinations of some characters. “Forced information” was used. So, the British bombed the port of Calais, and the Germans gave an encryption code, and in it - already famous words! Decryption was made easier by the laziness of some radio operators, who did not change the settings for 2-3 days.
The Nazis were let down by their penchant for complex technical solutions where simpler methods were more reliable. They didn't even know about the Ultra program. Fixated with the idea of Aryan superiority, they considered Enigma impenetrable, and the enemy’s awareness was the result of espionage and betrayal. They managed to get into the London-Washington government communications network and read all the interceptions. Having revealed the codes of sea convoys, they pointed at them “ wolf packs"submarines, which cost the Anglo-Saxons 30,000 lives of sailors. However, with an exemplary order in the organization of affairs, they did not have a single decryption service. This was done by 6 departments, which not only did not work together, but also hid their skills from their fellow competitors. The communication system was assessed for resistance to hacking not by cryptographers, but by technicians. Yes, there were investigations into suspicions of a leak via the Enigma line, but the specialists could not open the authorities’ eyes to the problem. “The chief submariner of the Reich, Admiral Doenitz, did not understand that it was not radars, not direction finding, but the reading of ciphergrams that made it possible to find and destroy their boats” (post-war report of the Army Security Agency/USA).
It is said that without breaking the Nazis' main encryption machine, the war would have lasted two years longer, would have cost more casualties, and might not have ended without the atomic bombing of Germany. But this is an exaggeration. Of course, it’s more enjoyable to play by looking at your opponent’s cards, and decoding is very important. However, she did not defeat the Nazis. After all, from February to December 1942, without having a single decipherment, the Allies destroyed 82 German submarines. And on land, the Germans in a huge number of operations sent information by wire, by courier, by dogs or pigeons. During World War II, half of all information and orders were transmitted in this way.
...In the summer of '45, the guys from TICOM (Target Intelligence Committee, an Anglo-American office for the seizure of German information technologies) confiscated and took away the latest Enigmas and specialists in them. But the car (Schlüsselkasten 43) continued to be produced: in October - 1000, in January 1946 - already 10,000 units! Its hacking remained a secret, and the myth about the absolute reliability of the product of “German genius” spread throughout the planet. The Anglo-Saxons sold thousands of Enigmas to dozens of countries of the British Commonwealth of Nations on all continents. There they worked until 1975, and the “benefactors” read the secrets of any government.
Enigma was used by many: the Spanish - commercial, the Italian Navy - Navy Cipher D, the Swiss - Enigma K. The Japanese clone of Enigma was the 4-rotor GREEN. The British made their Typex according to drawings and even from Enigma parts, piratedly using the patent.
Today there are up to 400 working copies of Enigma in the world, and anyone can purchase it for 18-30 thousand euros.
The chatterbox will be shot!
The measures taken to conceal the Ultra program were unprecedented. German ships and submarines were sunk after gutting so that the enemy would not realize they had been captured. The prisoners were isolated for years, their letters home were intercepted. They exiled their chatterbox sailors to serve in darkness like Falkland Islands. The received intelligence data underwent revision/distortion, and only then was transferred to the troops. IN in full the mastery of the “Riddle” was hidden throughout the war even from “big brother” the USA. Knowing from the encryption about the upcoming bombing of Coventry on November 14, 1940, the population of the city was not evacuated so that the Germans would not realize that they were being “read”. This cost the lives of half a thousand townspeople.
At the height of the war, up to 12 thousand people worked in the Ultra program: mathematicians, engineers, linguists, translators, military experts, chess players, puzzle specialists, operators. Two thirds of the staff were wrens (Women's Royal Naval Service). While doing their tiny part of the job, no one knew what they were doing as a whole, and the word "Enigma" had never been heard. People who did not know what was happening behind the next door were constantly reminded: “For chatting about work, you will be shot.” Only 30 years later, after the secrecy was lifted, some of them dared to admit what they did during the war. A. Turing wrote a book about breaking Enigma: the British government did not allow its release until 1996!
The Nazis did not have their own “mole” in Bletchley Park. But for the USSR what was happening there was no secret. Moscow received small doses of “ultra” category information on the direct orders of Churchill, despite the protests of his headquarters. In addition, British intelligence officer John Cairncross, who had access to secret data, supplied the Russians with them without restriction, including Enigma decryptions.
The success of the Enigma crackers was based on just a few well-timed statements. brilliant ideas. Without them, Enigma would have remained a Mystery. Stuart Milner-Berry, British chess champion, one of the main burglars at Bletchley Park: “There is no such example since ancient times: the war was fought in such a way that one enemy could constantly read the most important messages from the army and navy of the other.”
After the war, the Turing bombs were destroyed for safety reasons. 60 years later, the Enigma & Friends society tried to recreate one of them. Only the collection of components took 2 years, and the assembly of the machine itself took 10 years.