Eli5 how did the allies in ww2 decipher German enigma if there were millions of possibilities for letters and it was being changed every day?
In: 14
You should watch “The Imitation Game” which is a somewhat fictionalized story about how the Enigma codes were broken. It was much more involved than the movie makes it out, but it’s a decent telling of part of the story.
Spies were used to gain information regarding the machines and the messages sent. The Polish gave the allies important information on how the machines were constructed and the underlying code cypher principles. Code-breakers worked to decode individual repeating parts of messages, and then extrapolate the entire message from those fragments. That was what Turing’s machine did. Cipher books were seized by the allies at various times during the war, which made it possible to decode messages until those ciphers were updated.
But the basic reason that they were able to decode Enigma was humans. In theory, it should not have been breakable. But because humans are fallible, some procedures and working parts were compromised and that allowed others to break the codes.
Latest Answers