An imitating game with only the most essential information left out
Just a little while more till the robots finally catch up with us. So, we'll be able to spare some time to educate you about cryptography throughout the age of electromechanical devices. You should read the first part of the post to gain a better understanding of what's happening here.
People sometimes take a horrible move into the abyss, but they always get back up and keep going. War is always a bottomless hole. Electromechanical cryptography is a new type of cryptography that grew out of World War II.
A typewriter is something most of us know what it looks like. However, not many people would say that it was the scariest weapon of the 20th century. You can see what the Enigma military cipher machine looks like here.
One could say that "Enigma" wasn't the name of a single machine but of a group of machines. They were set up differently, but they both did the same thing, which was to encrypt. A basic substitution cipher, which we were familiar with, remained the foundation of encryption. But there were several changes, and the move was different for each letter.
It looked like a typewriter at first look—a simple white box with a keyboard and a few controls. It was within that the magic of chaos was being unveiled. The rotors, which were internal disks in the Enigma, were in charge of text encryption. On every disc, you might find 26 contacts.
Each rotor operated by taking on a letter value and releasing a different one. A random and indecipherable amount of shifts caused the meaning of the initial letter written on the machine's keyboard to alter many times. The second rotor changed the transmitted encryption after the first rotor had communicated one. Continue until the rotors are exhausted. The Enigma model dictated whether there would be three or four pieces in the end.
The security got even more difficult when a patch panel was made. Its cells were set up so that the number of them matched the number of letters in the alphabet. The numbers of the two cells were switched because a wire linked them. By moving the wire from the "A" socket to the "E" socket, you were able to change the letters. This means that after all of these changes, there are 150738274937250 possible cipher versions, which is twice the 47th degree.
While "Enigma" had a complicated operating concept, it was simple to put into practice. Just typing in some words and seeing what happened was all that was needed. "Enigma" was a hit with consumers; throughout its lifetime, over 100,000 units were manufactured. Even at that early stage, the tale of enhancing the gadget with add-ons became significant. Instead of seeing the light bulbs illuminate, the cipher might be shown on the panel in one of the layouts. Another option is to utilize a wire to access Enigma remotely; in this setup, the operator on one end of the wire would only know the message, while the operator on the other end would only know the cipher. This is now a new part of the secret.
Yes, there are a lot of unanswered questions about Bletchley Park. Even though a number of devices had encrypted communications before to Enigma, the latter's advanced communication technique made it more well-known and utilized. Furthermore, when Enigma was first developed in Germany, decoding devices were already being developed in Britain, underscoring the continued technological competitiveness and geopolitical significance of communication strategies at that time.
The massive machine's surprising appearance in The Imitation Game is purely for dramatic effect. At that point in time, the Colossus was one of the cars at Bletchley Park. Just looking at the name gives you a clue about how enormous this apparatus was. A "Colossius" was a light-and switch-equipped cabinet. Later replaced by Enigma, it deciphered "fish" ciphers used in intercepted radio transmissions.
Whether it was a blessing or a curse, his problem-solving abilities were too limited, and we needed to find a solution that could handle Enigma.
Following this, the Turing Bomb detonated.
Obviously, the bomb did not go off. It was the machine's secret name that proved to be Enigma's downfall. Even though we lived through it, the Turing machine was a game-changer back then. She was the one responsible for laying the groundwork for today's computers. Next time, though, we'll go into greater depth on this.