The plug board for example enabled the machine to increase its number of possible cipher starting points to something between two and three billion. The Enigma's rotors were also interchangeable while being wired differently, adding even more protection and encryption. In order to decipher codes created in this way, the code breaker would need to know not only the positions of each rotor, but also each starting position. Incredibly, according to Cooper, 100 machines working 24 hours per day would take 5.8 years to exhaust all the possibilities created in this way. It was therefore impossible to decipher the codes without the actual machine, the cipher key, and the correct rotor placements.
Nevertheless, there were those who attempted the impossible, and eventually succeeded, because the Enigma machine was not as flawless as the German officials believed it at first. The first attempts at deciphering the codes emerged from Poland's Cipher Bureau during 1932. According to Rijmenants, Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zyglaski and Jerzy Rozicki used two major security flaws - the "Achilles heel" of the Enigma - to eventually attain success. These are the global ground setting and the twice encoded message key - the latter was implemented to exclude possible errors from encrypted messages. The initial success was however short lived, and elements such as increased sophistication, new procedures, and lack of funds defeated the Polish effort by 1939. Poland succumbed to German invasion, but their initial efforts survived to reach French an British shores.
The Government Code and Cipher School from the United Kingdom built upon the Polish work to break the Enigma code initially by hand and later by increasingly complicated deciphering machines (Rijmenants). These were developed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, who many credit with winning the war as a result of their deciphering efforts. In short, the Turing machine searched for given pieces of plain and cipher text, which were then used to identify the key settings that served as the basis for deciphering the rest of each message.
Extraordinary measures were taken to keep the German forces from suspecting that their ciphers might be compromised.
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