The Enimga Machine - Scholarship Essay Example

? Enigma Machine Introduction Man has always been a warrior. Being the most distinguished and distinct creation of nature does not stop man from claiming its superiority over the other. The race to win over the other and the urge to dominate has kept man combating at various platforms for various reasons throughout past and present. Right from the inception of man, his desire to excel, dominate and rule has got exceedingly deeper and drastically dangerous. When it comes to win over another then man does not even think twice before cutting throat others irrespective of their relationship and status in this world. History of the world has witnessed a large number of massacres, wars, acts of manslaughter and destruction in the name of pride, honor and victory. The brutal nature of man continued evolving and intensified to exorbitant levels with the passage of time. The ego of man and desire to become superior, have led him to change the course of history and the rules of the games. Every fight that man has fought has resulted in the laying down and slaying of innocent beings and creatures. The destructions caused by man may have led to a momentary satisfaction of the desires but it was always a chain reaction, with the end of one battle marking the beginning of another and so on and so forth. This urge to command and rule has triggered the world into an era where every other nation, race and community wants to exercise dominance over the other. This time the term dominance is to be taken in the greatest and deepest sense of the word.1 Man, today, wants to dominate his counterparts in every possible field and in any possible way. This modern touch to the race to dominate led to the development and advancement of information, science and technology. To stay ahead of the opponents and competitors man has invented various equipments and methods that provide him with an undue advantage and an unbeatable edge over the competition. One such invention is the Enigma Machine, also known as Enigma Cipher Machine. Enigma Machine, the basics With the evolution of science and technology the meaning and essence of warfare and combat changed a great deal. War was no more confined to conventional bloodshed and mass killings alone, in fact now it encircled attacks on the ideological and intellectual fronts as well. Enigma machine was one such invention that was created to outpace the competition in the field of communication and message transmission using state- of-the-art technology. Enigma machine was a consequent of the advancements and inroads made by the scientists and engineers in the field of wireless communications in the early 20th century. This new mode of communication revolutionized the way traditional communication used to take place. Now getting the message across to geographic regions was becoming easier and viable for commercial as well as military purposes. Enigma machine was a modern solution to the tedious and time consuming process of encipherment. Traditionally confidential messages to be transmitted from one office or landmark to another were encrypted between the locations. Cryptography was the putting down of a message in coded form known as encoding or encryption. The process of traditional encipherment also entailed the decryption or decoding of the encrypted message received by the receiver. The sender and receiver both used the same code book to encode and decode the message send and received respectively. The encrypted message was always in the form of alphabets or letters that were neither readable by anyone nor interpretable without following a proper and distinct procedure. The information that was hidden under the code was known as plaintext and the coded or encrypted information was referred to as cipher text.2 Need is the mother of invention and it was soon realized that the time consuming process must be replaced by an efficient one to make encipherment faster and more effective. The evolution in the mechanism started in the early 20th century with heavy cipher machines being invented weighing up to 50 kg and more. The machinery inside these Enigma Cipher Machines, as they were known, was sophisticated and complex. In the initial phases of development, during the early 20th century, these machines failed to attract the attention of military as they were too heavy and complex to be handled in the battle field. With the passage of time newer and easy to use versions of the machines were invented that made them appear more and more attractive for military use and these machines were adopted by Italy, Spain and Japan for bolstering the communication component of their militaries. This fact is not known to many that Enigma is just the name of the brand, in actual these machines are classified and renowned as cipher machines.3 Inventors of the Ciper Machine The cipher machines that were used in World War II, WW II, were the modified version of the concept of wheel ciphers developed by the 3rd president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson in 1790s. The basic structure of Jefferson’s wheel cipher comprised of 36 wheels and 25 lines of alphabets, on each, that were arranged around an axle in a manner that would allow them to rotate around the axis. Each wheel had alphabets embossed over it. The rotation of wheels would change the arrangement of alphabets on the entire cipher and this ultimately would produce a coded form of information. The sender of the message would spin each disk or wheel of the cipher to produce the encoded message using the available 25 lines of the cipher machine.4 The machine allowed the message to be encoded only using alphabets and not numbers, symbols or spaces. The receiver on receiving the message will be required to arrange the wheels of the machine in the agreed upon manner. Once the wheels have been arranged in the predetermined order, between the receiver and the sender, the receiver would be required to scan through all the 25 lines of the machines. The line containing the coded message will automatically stand out from the rest of the twaddle information. This invention was a landmark in the field of communication and privacy. A sender could use the same machine to communicate different messages to different receivers by arranging the wheels of the cipher machine in a unique and interpretable format.5 Though Jefferson’s invention was a great breakthrough in the field of communication but it still required continuous improvement and development. Various mathematicians and engineers worked on this initial idea to make it more and more immaculate and user friendly. Arthur Scherbius, a German engineer, succeeded in providing a modified mechanism and notion to the cipher machine concept. Scherbius added the rotor principle to the cipher machine, making it mechanically and technically more sophisticated and secured in message transmission. Scherbius tried to market the machine for commercial purposes but the invention was way too advanced to be understood by the layman for its implications. Just like Jefferson, Scherbius’s invention was ahead of its time. The market was not ready, developed and mature enough to understand the relevance of the cipher machine to their needs. On the commercial level, it took corporate the era of 1960s to start benefitting from this invention, at last, more than 3 decades after its invention. However German Government purchased the cipher machine in 1926 as part of its military restructuring and rehabilitation.6 The Functioning of the Machine and its evolution The previous figure just gives an idea of the transition that the cipher machine has been subjected to post, its inception, from manually operated to complete automated model. This transition has come in a period of more than 100 years and it revolutionized the conventional methods of communication and showed a new dimension to the world for future developments and inroads to be made in the field of wireless communication. 7 Conventionally cryptography was exercised using a pen and paper as the sole tools of encoding a message to communicate it to a desired recipient. This method was, though, convenient and less technical to practice but had limitations. The message in the first place would take some time to get transmitted to the recipient manually, and secondly spying was easier. Any unwanted recipient could have decoded the secret message, as all that was required was access to the paper containing the coded message. Germany faced a similar technical defeat at the hands of French cryptographers that decoded a paper-and-pencil field cipher from Germany in World War I, subjecting Germans to a humiliating defeat. With the modifications and advancements made to its design, the cipher machine completely revolutionized the conventional communication methodology. Now the operator could send the encrypted message using the rotors and the wires machinery. The machine was required to be setup in a specific manner in order to complement the receiver. The operator used to type the message using the interface keyboard, but the machine had a corresponding letter for every letter of the alphabets typed and thus encoding was done with convenience. The encoded message was transmitted using radio technology to the receiver. The receiver was required to type the received encoded message into the cipher machine that would in turn decode the message and communicate the information. Adoption of Enigma Machine by Germany The World War I, 1914 to 1918, led to the defeat of Germany. Out of the many lessons learnt after the defeat, one critical one was the failure of the existing confidentiality protocols. The German Military used to communicate confidential information in coded form using pen and paper methodology. In this conventional methodology, as mentioned earlier, out of the many downsides one obvious one was the ability to be decoded by intruders and unwanted recipients leading to substantial loss of private communication between military battalions. One such event led to the demise of the Germany in World War I. The loss of information at the hands of the French opponents resulted in a crucial and humiliating defeat faced by Germans in the war. This ignited the passion in Germany to reunite, re-establish and overcome their weaknesses of the past. The urge in the German military to seek improved communicative methodologies made them one of the pioneers in adapting to Dr Arthur Scherbius’s cipher machine invention.8 Dr Scherbius invented the cipher machine for the sole purpose of commercial use. The cipher machine was invented to facilitate commercial corporate players to communicate from various locations. This technology would have enabled the companies to transmit crucial and competitive information in a secured manner across physical boundaries without moving a muscle. The corporate sector at that point in time wasn’t ready to accept the relevance of this idea to their operations. However Germany, recently humiliated at the hands of the enemy, was all geared up to take revenge and reunite to get back and stronger in the battle field.9 The wireless technology, use of rotors and speed of communication and information transmission were the features that appealed Germany the most. Germany identified cipher machine to be the best solution to the lapses encountered by their military in the crushing defeat in World War I. German Navy, Military and Air force all endorsed this new technology and indulged in its manufacturing and up-gradation at a customized level to reinvent it and make it more relevant and convenient for usage in battle fields and war front. German Military diverted their efforts in making the enigma machines more and more complex in their structure and operations to ensure that information is not decoded by hackers, intruders and code breakers at any cost. The utilization of Enigma Cipher Machines started before World War II. The German Military officials were confident of the reliability of the modified versions of cipher machines that they possessed. This perhaps led to complacence among the ranks of the officers and they depended overwhelmingly upon the cipher technology and its ability to be a safe and secured mode of information transmission. Britain and its Polish allies were finding it really impossible to decode the messages encrypted by the Germans. It was not possible until a German military clerk, Schimidt, allowed the cipher machine operation manuals to be photographed by French spies. This turned out to be a break through in code breaking procedures. As now a foundation was provided to the code breakers to devise a solid framework of tapping information from the enemy and preplanning defense and attack strategies against the premeditated actions and plans of the Germans.10 It is being said that the decoding mechanism developed by the British and its code breaking allies played a vital role in finishing the War at least two years ahead of where it would have ended if the technology was not put into practice. This resulted in saving priceless lives of innocent people at both ends. Conclusion Enigma Cipher Machine is a universe in itself. Its complex wiring and rotors make it a sophisticated modern day invention. But with its invention and the later adoption by the German military, led to a cat and mouse chase. Where there is good, there is evil, where there is negative there is positive and the same held true in case of the cipher machine. The inception of the encoding devise automatically developed the demand for a decoding and intercepting one. With scientists and engineers making inroads in the development and progress of technology and taking it to an ever elevated level, an invention is only as good as its alternative. Enigma Cipher Machine was serving the purpose well enough until it was countered by interceptors and decoders of the British military and its allies. The Germans tried their best to make the machine as sophisticated and complicated as possible but they couldn’t stop the information from being tapped up on by foreign agents. The task at the hands of decoders and hackers was way more complex than what one may perceive. The interceptors and interpreters had not only to decode and interpret the information; in fact they also had to accomplish this as fast as they possibly could, as decoding outdated information would have resulted in wastage of time and resources. The British and its allies mastered the art of decoding information and making the best use of it in the fastest manner possible. Though it required a lot of unconditional effort from the developers, but the contribution that they came up with at the end, to code break the German messages was priceless. The anti cipher technology was a favor to humanity and mankind. It resulted in the prevention of further deaths and thus ended the war and the series of mass killings and genocide executed in that era. References Adrian Gilbert. Codes and Ciphers. Firefly Books. 2009. Brian J. Winkel, Cipher Deavors and David Kahn. The German Enigma Cipher Machine: Beginnings, Success, and Ultimate Failure. Artech House Print on Demand. 2005. Cipher A. Deavours and Louis Kruh. Machine Cryptography and Modern Cryptanalysis. Artech House Publishers. 1985. Gary Blackwood. Mysterious Messages: A History of Codes and Ciphers. Dutton Juvenile. 2009. Hugh Sebag-Montefiore. Enigma: The Battle for the Code. Wiley. 2004. Stephen Budiansky. Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II. Free Press. 2002. Wladyslaw Kozaczuk. Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken, and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two. University Publications of America. 1984. Wladyslaw Kozaczuk and Jerzy Straszak. Enigma: How the Poles Broke the Nazi Code. Hippocrene Books. 2004. Read More