#GERMAN ENIGMA MACHINE PORTABLE#

Like other rotor machines, the Enigma machine is a combination of mechanical and electrical systems. For a discussion of how Enigma-derived intelligence was put to use, see ULTRA. For the history and techniques of how Enigma was broken, see Cryptanalysis of the Enigma. This article discusses the Enigma machine itself: its components and its procedures. The exact influence of ULTRA is debated, but a typical assessment is that the end of the European war was hastened by two years because of the decryption of German ciphers.Īlthough the Enigma cipher has cryptographic weaknesses, it was, in practice, only their combination with other significant factors which allowed codebreakers to read messages: mistakes by operators, procedural flaws, and the occasional captured machine or codebook. The intelligence gained through this source - codenamed ULTRA - was a significant aid to the Allied war effort. The machine has gained notoriety because Allied cryptologists were able to decrypt a large number of messages that had been enciphered on the machine. The German military model, the Wehrmacht Enigma, is the version most commonly discussed. The Enigma was used commercially from the early 1920s on, and was also adopted by the military and governmental services of a number of nations - most famously by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. More precisely, Enigma was a family of related electro-mechanical rotor machines - comprising a variety of different models.

#GERMAN ENIGMA MACHINE PORTABLE#

In the history of cryptography, the Enigma was a portable cipher machine used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages.

German enigma machine