Enigma Machine

The Enigma Machine was a machine used by the Germans in WW2 in order to transmit messages. It helped encrypt the messages such that the messages were coded. This helped to prevent other nations from cracking German codes during the war since there were billions of ways to encode a message using the device. At the time, the code seemed unbreakable. One of the major flaws with the Enigma machine, however, was that a letter couldn’t be encoded as itself, so a letter would be converted to another random letter but not itself. So, for example, an A would not be encoded to be an A. This made it easier to guess a word or phrase that would likely appear in the message, thus allowing codebreakers to start cracking the code. For example, they knew that there would likely be a weather report at the beginning of the message or the phrase “Heil Hitler”. After a British man by the name of Alan Turing exploited weaknesses of the Enigma code and gained access to German codebooks, he and other researchers designed the Bombe machine. The device was used to discover the settings of the Enigma machines. The way it worked is that it would determine the settings of the Enigma machines, and then that made it so that all the messages for that network that day could be decrypted. The Allies were able to prevent many attacks with this machine but had to allow some attacks to be carried out in order to avoid any suspicion. Unfortunately for Turing, he was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, and he later died cyanide poisoning. It was officially determined to be a suicide but potentially could have been an accidental poisoning. However, he will always be remembered; in 2021, the £50 will have his face on one side. 

Sources:

https://brilliant.org/wiki/enigma-machine/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine