Enigma (machine)

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Enigma brand plate

Enigma was a rotor machine designed to encrypt and decrypt messages. Patented in 1918 by the German firm Scherbius and Ritter, and co-founded by Arthur Scherbius, who had bought the patent from a Dutch inventor, it was offered for sale in 1923 for commercial use. In 1926, the German Navy adopted it for commercial use. military and soon after its use was extended to the other German armed forces, especially during World War II.

Its ease of use and its apparent cryptographic robustness were the main reasons for its implementation. However, thanks to the investigations carried out by the Polish intelligence services, which in turn instructed the French and English services in the encryption system, it was finally discovered, which precipitated the outcome of the Second World War in favor of the Allies. These also took advantage of the failures in the use procedures by the German operators, which allowed the interception of the decryption tables and the capture of some devices.

The equivalent British machine, the Bombe, and several American ones, such as the SIGABA (or M-135-C in the military), were similar to the Enigma. The first modern rotary cipher machine, by Edward Hebern, was considerably less secure than Enigma.

The machine

An electromechanical rotary encryption machine; the version shown is possibly military, but is similar to the Enigma-D commercial.

Operation

Enigma Machine at the National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo da Vinci, Milan

The Enigma machine was an electromechanical device, meaning it used a combination of mechanical and electrical parts. The mechanism was basically made up of a keyboard similar to that of typewriters whose keys were electrical switches, a mechanical gear and a panel of lights with the letters of the alphabet.

The electrical part consisted of a battery that lit one of a series of lamps, representing each of the different letters of the alphabet. You can see the keyboard at the bottom of the attached image, and the lamps are the little circles that appear on top of it.

The heart of the Enigma machine was mechanical, consisting of several interconnected rotors. Each rotor is a flat circular disk with 26 electrical contacts on each face, one for each letter of the alphabet. Each contact on one side is connected or wired to a different contact on the opposite side. For example, in a particular rotor, the number 1 contact on one face may be connected to the number 14 contact on the other face and the number 5 contact on one face to the number 22 contact on the other. Each of the five rotors supplied with the Enigma machine was wired differently, and the rotors used by the German Army had different wiring than commercial models.

Inside the machine there were, in most versions, three slots to house the rotors. Each of the rotors was fitted into the corresponding slot so that its output contacts connected to the input contacts of the next rotor. The third and last rotor was connected, in most cases, to a reflector that connected the output contact of the third rotor with another contact of the same rotor to carry out the same process but in the opposite direction and by a different route. The existence of the reflector differentiates the Enigma machine from other rotor-based cipher machines of the time. This element, which was not included in the first versions of the machine, made it possible for the key used for encryption to be used to decrypt the message. You can see in the upper part of the image the three rotors with their corresponding toothed protuberances that allowed them to be turned by hand, placing them in a certain position.

Figure and decipher using an enigma machine. 2016

When a key on the keyboard was pressed, for example the one corresponding to the letter A, the electric current coming from the battery was directed to the contact corresponding to the letter A of the first rotor. The current crossed the internal wiring of the first rotor and was located, for example, in the contact corresponding to the letter J on the opposite side. Suppose this contact of the first rotor was aligned with the contact corresponding to the letter X of the second rotor. The current reached the second rotor and made its way through the second and third rotors, the reflector, and back through all three rotors on the way back. At the end of the run, the output of the first rotor was connected to the lamp corresponding to a letter, other than A, on the light panel. The encryption message was therefore obtained by substituting the letters of the original text for those provided by the machine.

Each time a letter of the original message was entered by pressing the corresponding key on the keyboard, the position of the rotors would change. Due to this variation, two identical letters in the original message, for example AA, were matched by two different letters in the encrypted message, for example QL. In most versions of the machine, the first rotor advanced one position with each letter. When 26 letters had been entered and therefore the first rotor had completed a complete turn, the position of the second rotor was advanced by one notch, and when the second rotor finished its turn, the position of the third rotor was varied. The number of steps that caused the advance of each of the rotors was a parameter configurable by the operator.

Because each rotor was wired differently, the exact sequence of replacement alphabets varied depending on which rotors were installed in the slots (each machine had five), their installation order, and the starting position of the rotors. each. These data were known as the initial configuration, and were distributed, monthly at first and more frequently as the war progressed, in books to the users of the machines.

The operation of the most common versions of the Enigma machine was symmetrical in the sense that the decryption process was analogous to the encryption process. To obtain the original message, all you had to do was enter the letters of the encrypted message into the machine, and it would return the letters of the original message one by one, as long as the initial configuration of the machine was identical to the one used to encrypt the information.

Basic Cryptanalysis

Ciphers can of course be cracked, and the most effective way to approach it depends on the encryption method. At the beginning of World War I, the decryption departments were advanced enough to be able to crack most ciphers, if enough effort was expended. However, most of these techniques relied on getting enough amounts of ciphertext with a particular key. From these texts, with sufficient statistical analysis, patterns could be recognized and the key deduced.

Encrypt and decrypt using an enigma machine. 2016

Machine Enigma aboard a Sd.KFz 251 by Heinz Guderian

Analysts typically look for some common letters and combinations. For example, in English, E, T, A, O, I, N, and S are generally easy to identify, because they are very frequent (see ETAOIN SHRDLU and EAOSR NIDLC on frequency analysis); also NG, ST and other combinations, very frequent in English. Once some (or all) of these elements are identified, the message is partially decrypted, revealing more information about other likely substitutions. Simple frequency analysis relies on a letter always being substituted for another letter from the sourcetext in the ciphertext; if this is not the case, the situation is more difficult.

For a long time, cryptographers attempted to hide frequencies by using several different substitutions for common letters, but this cannot completely hide patterns in the substitutions for letters in the original text. Such codes were widely used around the year 1500.

One technique to make frequency analysis more difficult is to use a different substitution for each letter, not just the common ones. This process would normally be very time consuming and required both parties to exchange their substitution patterns before sending encrypted messages. In the mid-15th century, a new technique was invented by Alberti, now generally known as the polyalphabetic cipher, which provided a simple technique for creating a multiplicity of substitution patterns. The two parties would exchange a small amount of information (referred to as the key) and follow a simple technique that produces many substitution alphabets, and many different substitutions for each letter of the original text. The idea is simple and effective, but it turned out to be more difficult than expected. Many ciphers were partial implementations of the concept, and were easier to break than earlier ciphers (eg the Vigenère cipher).

It took hundreds of years to find reliable methods to break polyalphabetic ciphers. New techniques relied on statistics (eg frequency analysis) to discover information about the key used for a message. These techniques look for repeating patterns in the ciphertext, which would provide clues about the length of the key. Once this is known, the message is essentially converted to a series of messages, each the length of the key, to which normal frequency analysis can be applied. Charles Babbage, Friedrich Kasiski, and William F. Friedman are among those who did most of the work to develop these techniques.

Users of ciphers were advised to use not only a different substitution for each letter, but also a very long key, so that new decryption techniques would fail (or at least be much more complicated). However, this is very difficult to achieve; Getting the parties exchanging messages a long key takes more time, and errors are more likely. The ideal cipher of this class would be one in which such a long key could be generated from a simple pattern, producing a cipher in which there are so many substitution alphabets that occurrence counting and statistical attacks are impossible.

The use of multiple rotors in Enigma provided a simple way to determine which substitution alphabet to use for a particular message (in the encryption process) and for a ciphertext (in the decryption process). In this respect it was similar to the polyalphabetic cipher. Unlike most variants of the polyalphabetic system, however, the Enigma had no obvious key length, because the rotors generated a new substitution alphabet at each press, and the entire sequence of substitution alphabets could be changed by spinning. one or more rotors, changing the order of the rotors, etc., before starting a new encoding. In the simplest sense, Enigma had a repertoire of 26 x 26 x 26 = 17,576 replacement alphabets for any given rotor combination and order. As long as the original message was no longer than 17,576 keystrokes, there would be no repeated use of a replacement alphabet. But the Enigma machines added other possibilities. The sequence of the alphabets used was different if the rotors were placed in the ABC position, compared to ACB; there was a rotating ring on each rotor that could be set in a different position, and the starting position of each rotor was also variable. And most military-grade Enigmas added a stecker (interconnect board) that changed several key assignments (eight or more, depending on the model). Thus, this key can be easily communicated to another user. It's just a few simple values: rotors to use, rotor order, ring positions, home position, and interconnect board settings.

The encryption method

Of course, if the configuration were available, a cryptanalyst could simply put an Enigma machine with the same configuration and decrypt the message. One could send config books to use, but they could be intercepted. Instead, the Germans set up a cunning system that mixed the two designs.

At the beginning of each month, Enigma operators were given a new book containing the initial settings for the machine. For example, on a particular day the setups might be to put rotor #1 in slot 7, #2 in slot 4, and #3 in slot 6. They are then rotated, so that slot 1 is in the letter X, slot 2 in the letter J, and slot 3 in the letter A. Since the rotors could be interchanged in the machine, with three rotors in three slots you get another 3 x 2 x 1 = 6 combinations to consider, to give a total of 105,456 possible alphabets.

At this point, the operator would select some other settings for the rotors, this time defining only the positions or "turns" of the rotors. A particular operator might select ABC, and these become the 'message for that encryption session' setting. They then typed the message configuration into the machine that was still in the initial configuration. The Germans, believing that they were making the process more secure, double-typed it, but this was revealed as one of the security holes with which to "break" the secret of Enigma. The results would be encoded so that the ABC sequence typed twice could be converted to XHTLOA. The operator then turns the rotors to the message configuration, ABC. Then the rest of the message is typed and sent over the radio.

At the receiving end, the operation is reversed. The operator puts the machine in the initial configuration and enters the first six letters of the message. By doing this he will see ABCABC on the machine. Then he turns the rotors to ABC and inputs the rest of the encrypted message, deciphering it.

This system was great because cryptanalysis is based on some kind of frequency analysis. Even if many messages were sent on any given day with six letters from the initial setup, those letters were assumed to be random. While an attack on the encryption itself was possible, a different encryption was used on each message, making frequency analysis practically useless.

The Enigma was very safe. So much so that the Germans trusted her a lot. Enigma-encrypted traffic included everything from high-level messages about tactics and plans, to trivia like weather reports and even birthday wishes.

Encryption Example

The following is an authentic message sent on July 7, 1941 by the SS-Totenkopf Division regarding the campaign against Russia, in Operation Barbarossa. The message (sent in two parts) was decrypted by Geoff Sullivan and Frode Weierud, two members of the Crypto Simulation Group (CSG).

1840 - 2TLE 1TL 179 - WXC KCH
RFUGZ EDPUD NRGYS ZRCXN
UYTPO MRMBO FKTBZ REZKM
LXLVE FGUEY SIOZV EQMIK
UBPMM YLKLT TDEIS MDICA
GYKUA CTCDO MOHWX MUUIA
UBSTS LRNBZ SZWNR FXWFY
SSXJZ VIJHI DISHP RKLKA
YUPAD TXQSP INQMA TLPIF
SVKDA SCTAC DPBOP VHJK

2TL 155 - CRS YPJ
FNJAU SFBWD NJUSE GQOBH
KRTAR EEZMW KPPRB XOHDR
OEQGB BGTQV PGVKB VVGBI
MHUSZ YDAJQ IROAX SSSNR
EHYGG RPISE ZBOVM QIEMM
ZCYSG QDGRE RVBIL EKXYQ
IRGIR QNRDN VRXCY YTNJR
SBDPJ BFFKY QWFUS

The message was encrypted for the three-rotor model with reflector B (you'll have to use the same model to decrypt it, or a compatible one). To decipher the message, the machine must first be configured with the daily information specified in the German code books for that month. For July 7, 1941 it was:

Tag Walzenlage Ringstellung ---- Steckerverbindungen ----
7 II IV V 02 21 12 AV BS CG DL FU HZ IN KM OW RX

The machine operator had to place that setting before sending or receiving the first message of the day. I would take rotors (Walzenlage) 2, 4 and 5 (in that order), and move the ring of each rotor to positions 2, 21 and 12 respectively, as indicated by Ringstellung (sometimes the setting can be seen in the letters corresponding to the position of the ring, in this case they would be B U L), and it would insert them into the machine. He also had to place the connecting cables joining the lower part of the machine in the positions indicated in Steckerverbindungen , joining A with V, B with S, C with G, etc. This configuration will be maintained in all the messages of the day, and with it you can start decrypting messages.

The original message was sent in two parts (since the maximum size per message was 250 letters). Each message has a header, which was sent unencrypted (and is the only part of the message that could have numbers); in this case:

1840 - 2TLE 1TL 179 - WXC KCH

2TL 155 - CRS YPJ

The header indicated the time the message was sent (in this case 1840 represents 18:40), how many parts made up the message (followed by TLE, from Teile) and what part it was (followed by TL, from Teil) if there was more than one, the size of the ciphertext, and two groups of three letters (which were different and random in each message). The first group was the initial configuration and the second the encrypted key of the message. The operator will move the three rotors to the letter indicated by the first group (W X C), and will type the other group, the encrypted key (K C H), which will give the operator the unencrypted key, in this case B L A). Next, he will put the three rotors in the B L A positions and type the rest of the encrypted message, taking into account that the first five letters correspond to the Kenngruppe, which will indicate who can read the message (in this case it can be ignore).

AUFKL XABTE ILUNG XVONX
KURTI NOWAX KURTI NOWAX
NORDW ESTLX SEBEZ XSEBE
ZXUAF FLIEG ERSTR ASZER
IQTUN GXDUB ROWKI XDUBR
OWKIX OPOTS CHKAX OPOTS
CHKAX UMXEI NSAQT DREIN
ULLXU HRANG ETRET ENXAN
GRIFF XINFX RGTX

Doing the same process with the other part of the message, the result is:

DREIG EHTLA NGSAM ABERS
IQERV ORWAE RTSXE INSSI
EBENN ULLSE QSXUH RXROE
MXEIN SXINF RGTXD REIXA
UFFLI EGERS TRASZ EMITA
NFANG XEINS SEQSX KMXKM
XOSTW XKAME NECXK

Joining the messages, and using the X as spaces (some spaces are missing in the original message), and some abbreviations (in square brackets) leaves:

AUFKL[AERUNGS- ]ABTEILUNG VON KURTINOWA KURTINOWA
NORDWESTL[ICH] SEBEZ SEBEZ AUF FLIEGERSTRASZE
RIQTUNG DUBROWKI DUBROWKI OPOTSCHKA OPOTSCHKA UM
EINS AQT DREI NULL UHR ANGETRETEN ANGRIFF INF RGT
DREI GEHT LANGSAM ABER SIQER VORWAERTS EINS SIEBEN NULL
SEQS UHR ROEM[ISCH] EINS INF RGT DREI
AUF FLIEGERSTRASZE MIT ANFANG EINS SEQS KM KM
OSTW[AERTS] KAMENEC K

Proper nouns were placed twice in succession (for example, KURTINOWA), and some letter combinations were replaced, for example, CH by Q (in SIQER, which is sicher), and the numbers had to be written with letters. The translated text would be:

Kurtinowa reconnaissance unit, northwest of Sebez on the flight corridor towards Dubrowki, Opotschka. He started moving at 18:30. Attack. Infantry Regiment 3 moves slowly but surely. Hour 17:06, I (Roman number) Infantry Regiment 3 in the flight corridor starting 16 km east of Kamenec.

Spanish Civil War

During the Spanish Civil War, the rebels had at least twenty Enigma machines that allowed General Franco to maintain secret and permanent communication with his generals. The first ten were sold by the Nazis to the rebels in November 1936 when the Francoist advance stopped at the gates of Madrid. However, it was not the most advanced model (it was the D of the commercial range), since the Germans were concerned that some of them could fall into the hands of the Soviets, who supported the republicans, or the secret services. British deployed in Spain. The person in charge of training the soldiers who were going to use it was Commander Antonio Sarmiento —member of the General Staff and head of the Listening and Decryption Office of the Generalissimo Headquarters—, who in a report written in Salamanca in November 1936 stated: «To give an idea of the degree of security that is achieved with these machines, it is enough to say that the number of possible combinations to agree on rises to the fabulous figure of 1,252,962,387,456». At the beginning of 1937 ten more machines of the same model were purchased. Currently one of the machines is part of the stable collection of the Historical Military Museum of Seville. The machine dates from December 1938, when it landed in Seville, assigned to the Army of the South. Later, in July 1939, he went to the General Staff of the Second Military Region in Seville.

The presence of these machines in aid of the rebellious front forced the government of the Republic to face it in the war. Seven Spanish cryptographers from the secret service of the Republic and exiled in France, including Antonio Camazón from Valladolid, worked together with the French and Poles to decrypt the messages of the Enigma machine. His work was featured in the documentary Equipo D: los codigos olvidadas by Jorge Laplace.

World War II

“Breaking” Enigma

Poland ' s staff headquarters was located at the Saxon Palace

The German cipher-breaking effort began in 1939, when the Poles intercepted an Enigma machine sent from Berlin to Warsaw and mistakenly unprotected as diplomatic baggage. It wasn't a military version, but it did provide a hint that the Germans might be using an Enigma-type machine in the future. When the German army began using modified Enigmas years later, the Poles attempted to "break the system" by looking up the wiring for the rotors used in the army version and finding a way to retrieve the settings used for each particular message.

Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski

In late 1932, Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski made one of the most significant discoveries in the history of cryptanalysis using fundamental techniques of mathematics and statistics by finding a way to combine them. Thus, he managed to crack the code, but not having access to the machines themselves and their wiring, the Polish investigators could not decipher the encrypted messages until they received configuration data from the French intelligence service. Armed with this new information, the Poles were able to build a replica, from which they were already able to decipher the German messages.

For example, let's say an operator chose QRS as the setting for the message. He would put the machine in its initial settings for the day, and then type QRSQRS. This would become something like JXDRFT; It sounds like babbling, but the clue Rejewski seized on was that the puck had moved three positions between the two sets of QRS; we know that J and R are originally the same letter and the same for XF and DT. We don't know what the letters are, nor do we need to, because while there are a large number of rotor configurations, there are only a small number of rotors that will have a letter from J to R, X to F, and D to T. Rejewski He called these patterns strings.

Finding the appropriate strings out of the 10,545 combinations was quite a task. The Poles (particularly Rejewski's colleagues Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski) developed a number of help methods. One technique used blank strips for each rotor showing which letters could be chained, blocking out the letters that could not be chained. Users would take the strips by overlapping them, looking for the selections where all three letters were completely clear. The British had also developed such a technique when they succeeded in breaking the commercial Enigma, although they tried (and failed) to break the military versions of the Enigma.

The arrangement of these letters on the rotors created, by the intelligence service and its head of the French Deuxième Bureau, George Bertrand, groups named after them. "Each team had a fraction to increase performance" (among the three groups of cryptography experts made up of French, Polish and Spanish). The "D-Team" It was made up of seven exiled Spaniards from the secret service of the Republic ("5 officers and two political commissioners", he defines them) and directed by Camazón.

Of course, a few thousand possibilities was still a lot to try. To help with this, the Poles built machines consisting of "parallel puzzles" which they called the bomba kryptologiczna (cryptological bomb). It is possible that the name was chosen from a type of local frozen dessert, or from the ticking that the machines made when generating the combinations; the French changed the name to bombe and the English speakers to bomb (nothing points to something explosive). Possible disk sets would then be loaded into the machine and a message could be tested in the settings, one after the other. Now the possibilities were only hundreds. Those hundreds are a reasonable number to attack by hand.

The Poles were able to determine the wiring of the rotors in use at the time by the German Army, and decipher much of the traffic of the German Army in the 1930s until the beginning of World War II. They received some secret help from the French, who had an agent (Hans Thilo-Schmidt, codenamed Asch) in Berlin with access to the Enigma programmed keys, manuals, etc. The findings of the cryptanalyst Rejewski did not depend on that information; he was not even informed about the French agent, nor did he have access to that material.

However, in 1939, when the Germans added two more rotors to the machine, and the Poles, aware that the German invasion was approaching and unable to extend their techniques with the resources available, decided to share the results of their investigations with the French and British allies in a secret meeting that took place on July 26 and 27, 1939 in the town of Pyry, near Warsaw.

Whereas in the past they used only three rotors and simply moved them from slot to slot, now they introduced two additional rotors, thus using three out of five rotors at any one time. The operators also stopped sending the three letters corresponding to the individual configuration twice at the beginning of each message, eliminating the original method of attack.

Bletchley Park Mansion, the place where Enigma's messages were decrypted

All of this was sent to France in a diplomatic pouch; the British part went to Bletchley Park. Until then, the German military Enigma traffic had given up both the British and the French, and they considered the possibility of assuming that German communications would remain in the dark throughout the war.

Almost all of the staff of the Polish crypto section left Poland during the German invasion and most of them ended up in France, working with French cryptographers on German transmissions. Some Polish cryptographers were captured by the Germans before they left Poland or in transit, but nothing was revealed about Enigma's work. The work continued in France, at the "PC Bruno Station", until the fall of this country (and also a little after). Some of the Franco-Polish team then escaped to England; none were involved in the British cryptanalysis effort against the Enigma networks. When Rejewski himself learned (shortly before his death) of the work carried out at Bletchley Park, which he had begun in Poland in 1932, and of its importance in the course of the war and the Allied victory, he he was surprised.

Ultra

Alan Turing.

With Polish help en masse, the British began working on the German Enigma traffic. In early 1939 the British Secret Service set up its Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) in Bletchley Park, 50 miles north of London, to break enemy message traffic if possible. They also set up an interception network to capture encrypted traffic destined for the decryptors in Bletchley. There was a large organization that controlled the distribution of the results, secrets, of deciphered information. Strict rules were put in place to restrict the number of people who knew of Ultra's existence to ensure that no action would alert the Axis powers that the Allies possessed such knowledge. At the start of the war, the Bletchley Park product was codenamed 'Boniface' to give the impression to the uninitiated that the source was a secret agent. Such was the secrecy surrounding the 'Boniface' reports; that & # 39; its his & # 39; reports were brought directly to Winston Churchill in a locked box, to which the Prime Minister personally held the key. The information thus produced was called "Ultra".

At Bletchley Park, British mathematicians and cryptographers, including Alan Turing, chess and bridge players, and crossword puzzle fanatics, grappled with the problems presented by the many German variations of the Enigma, and found ways of breaking many of them. they. The British attacks against the Enigma teams were similar in concept to the original Polish methods, but based on different designs. First, the German army had changed their practices (more rotors, various configurations, etc.), so the Polish techniques without modifications were no longer effective. Second, the German navy had had safer practices, and no one had broken up the extra traffic.

A new attack relied on the fact that reflector (a proprietary Enigma feature) guaranteed that no letter could be encoded as itself, so that an A could never become an A again. Another technique assumed that several common expressions in German, such as "Heil Hitler" or "please answer," would frequently be found in one or the other clear text; successful guesses about the original text were known in Bletchley as sifting. With a fragment of the probable original text and the knowledge that no letter could be encoded as itself, it was not uncommon for a fragment of the corresponding ciphertext to be identified. This provides a clue about the configuration of the message, in the same way as the Poles before the War.

The same German operators gave immense help to the decryptors on several occasions. In one case, an operator was asked to send a test message, so he simply typed the letter T repeatedly. A British analyst received a long message without a single T at the intercept stations, and immediately understood what had happened. In other cases, Enigma operators constantly used the same settings to encode a message, often their own initials or those of their girlfriends. Analysts were set to search the sea of intercepted traffic for these messages every day, allowing Bletchley to use the original Polish techniques to find the initial configurations during the day. Other German operators used the same form for daily reports, mostly for weather reports, so the same screen could be used every day.

In the summer of 1940, British codebreakers, who were successfully cracking the Luftwaffe codes, were able to provide Churchill with information about the secret delivery of maps of England and Ireland to the invasion forces of Operation Lion Marine.

From its inception, the Navy version of the Enigma relied on a wider variety of rotors than either the Air Force or Army versions, as well as several operational methods that made it safer than other Enigma variants. Enigma. There was virtually no indication of the initial configurations of the machines, and there were few texts to clearly use them. Different and much more difficult methods had to be used to decipher the traffic between the Navy Enigmas, and due to the threat of U-boats cruising the Atlantic after the fall of France, a more direct decryption alternative had to be applied..

On May 7, 1941, the Royal Navy deliberately captured a German weather ship, along with equipment and encryption codes, and two days later U-110 was captured, also equipped with an Enigma machine, a codebook, an operations manual and other information that allowed the underwater traffic of coded messages to remain broken until the end of June, something that the members of the Navy continued to do shortly after. Although by this time, both the British and the Americans had Enigma machines and even had the ability to break the German code thanks to the efforts of the team led by Alan Turing, this capture facilitated the future work of Allied cryptographers.

After the war; public disclosure

The fact that Enigma's encryption had been broken during the war remained a secret until the late '60s. The significant contributions to the war effort of many great people were not made public, and they were unable to share in their share of the glory, even though their participation was probably one of the main reasons the Allies won the war as quickly as possible. they did it. Finally, the story came to light.

After the end of the war, the British and Americans sold the surplus Enigma machines to many countries around the world, which remained in the belief of its safety. Their information was not as secure as they thought, which of course was why the British and Americans made the machines available to them.

In 1967, David Kahn published his book The Codebreakers, which describes the capture of the Naval Enigma machine of U-505 in 1945. He commented that at that time the messages could already be read, needing to for it machines that filled several buildings. By the 1970s the new computer-based ciphers were becoming popular as the world migrated to computerized communications, and the utility of the Enigma (and rotary cipher machines in general) was rapidly declining. At that point it was decided to uncover the cake and official reports on the Bletchley Park operations began to appear in 1974.

In February 2006, and thanks to a translation program for this type of message called "Project-M4", it was possible to decipher one of the last messages that remained to be deciphered after the German surrender.

With the help of private computers, it has been possible to decipher the content sent by a submersible from the Atlantic, and whose translation read as follows: "Radio signal 1132/19. Content: Forced to submerge during attack, depth charges. Last enemy location: 8:30 a.m., grid AJ 9863, 220 degrees, 8 nautical miles. [I am] following [the enemy]. [The barometer] drops 14 millibars. NNO 4, visibility 10".

Simulators

Name	Platform	Types	Uhr	UKW-D
Web Encryptor - The Online Encrypter	React App (by Facebook)	Enigma I, M3 (Army/Navy), M4 (Army/Navy), Railway, Tirpitz, Zahlwerk (Default/G-260/G-312), Swiss-K (Air Force/Commercial)	No.	Yes.
Franklin Heath Enigma Simulator	Android	K Railway, Kriegsmarine M3,M4	No.	No.
EnigmAndroid	Android	Wehrmacht I, Kriegsmarine M3, M4, Abwehr G31, G312, G260, D, K, Swiss-K, KD, R, T	No.	No.
Andy Carlson Enigma Applet (Standalone Version)	Java	Kriegsmarine M3, M4	No.	No.
Minarke (Minarke Is Not A Real Kriegsmarine Enigma)	C/Posix/CLI (MacOS, Linux, UNIX, etc.)	Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, M3, M4	No.	No.
Russell Schwager Enigma Simulator	Java	Kriegsmarine M3	No.	No.
PA3DBJ G-312 Enigma Simulator	Javascript	G312 Abwehr	No.	No.
Terry Long Enigma Simulator	MacOS	Kriegsmarine M3	No.	No.
Paul Reuvers Enigma Simulator for RISC OS	RISC OS	Kriegsmarine M3, M4, G-312 Abwehr	No.	No.
Dirk Rijmenants Enigma Simulator v7.0	Windows	Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine M3, M4	No.	No.
Frode Weierud Enigma Simulators	Windows	Abwehr, Kriegsmarine M3, M4, Railway	No.	No.
Alexander Pukall Enigma Simulator	Windows	Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe	No.	No.
CrypTool 2 — Enigma component and cryptanalysis	Windows	A/B/D (commercial), Abwehr, Reichsbahn, Swiss-K, Enigma M3, Enigma M4	No.	No.

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