Enigma is a novel by Robert Harris, about a young mathematician trying to break the Germans' "Enigma" ciphers during World War II. It was adapted to film in 2001. Robert Harris is an English TV reporter and author, born in 1957 in the city of Nottingham. ... A three-rotor German military Enigma machine showing, from bottom to top, the plugboard, the keyboard, the lamps and the finger-wheels of the rotors emerging from the inner lid (version with labels). ... Combatants Allies: Poland, British Commonwealth, France/Free France, Soviet Union, United States, China, and others Axis Powers: Germany, Italy, Japan, and others Casualties Military dead: 17 million Civilian dead: 33 million Total dead: 50 million Military dead: 8 million Civilian dead: 4 million Total dead: 12 million World War II... Enigma is a 2001 film set in World War II. It stars Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet and is based on a novel of the same title by Robert Harris (Enigma). ...
Although the Enigma cipher has cryptographic weaknesses, it was, in practice, only their combination with other significant factors which allowed codebreakers to read messages: mistakes by operators, procedural flaws, and the occasional captured machine or codebook.
In early Enigma models, the alphabet ring is fixed; a complication introduced in later versions is the facility to adjust the alphabet ring relative to the core wiring.
Users of Enigma were assured of its security by the large number of possibilities; it was not feasible for an adversary to even begin to try every possible configuration in a brute force attack.
However, the reflector also gives Enigma the property that no letter can encrypt to itself; this property was exploited by codebreakers: it was a severe conceptual flaw, a cryptological mistake.
In the Wehrmacht Enigma, the reflector is fixed and does not rotate, and appeared in four versions.
The Swiss used a version of Enigma called model K or Swiss K, for military and diplomatic use, which was very similar to the commercial Enigma D. The machine was broken by a number of parties, including Germany, France, Britain and the United States (the latter codenamed it INDIGO).
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