Enigma Code Breaking

I went to Bletchley Park a couple of years ago. It's a very fascinating place. I remember hearing stories of code breakers who could infer that a piece of plaintext was all JJJJJJJJJJJ simply because, upon looking at the ciophertext, it contained no J (relying on the fact that no letter would ever encrypt to itself in Engima, because of the reflector). Indeed the Poles don't get enough credit for their contributions. And yeah, virtually all encryption was similar to Engima back then: t

Enigma has not been cracked by British but by Polish cryptographers. It's very well documented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Po...

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma also a lot of details

Poles smuggled out a complete first-model Enigma machine, performed the cryptanalysis that revealed its core weakness, and also created the first of the "bombe" machines used for most of the decryptions.Bletchley Park acted as central clearinghouse for intercepted ciphertexts, distributing decryptions with elaborate care to keep the Germans from knowing Enigma had been cracked. Late in the war, they built an electronic gadget called Colossus to decrypt traffic from a much more diffi

Wikipedia article "Cryptanalysis of the Enigma" from your first link mentions also Turing's involvement.

Look into Bletchley park & the cracking of Enigma...

Enigma wasn't hard through obscurity. The Allies had the Enigma machine long before they were able to crack it. It was hard because with the equipment of the day, it was pretty much unbreakable in the same way that prime-number based cryptography is today. It was only A. Turing developing a completely novel kind of machine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe) that enabled the decryption

Or Enigma Machines: http://wiki.franklinheath.co.uk/index.php/Enigma/Paper_Enigm...

while not Enigma related, Marian Rejewski and his colleagues, if I remember right, reconstructed physical Enigma (pre-war, 3 wheel) machines only from analysis of encrypted traffic, beating the French and English mathematicians working on the "enigma problem". it was pretty big and IMO comparable to Tuttes successes with Lorenz, it's annoying that history forgets Rejewski and his contributions so quickly.