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save hide report. During World War II, the Germans used ENIGMA, a cipher machine, to develop nearly unbreakable codes for sending messages.

What is surprising is that despite this inherent difficulty, Polish and English cryptanalysts came up with reliable ways of cracking this system. Close.

That's why they had to design a deciphering machine for it.

The machine was developed by the Dutch to communicate banking secrets. ENIGMA’s settings offered approx. The Enigma was a type of enciphering machine used by the German armed forces to send messages securely.

share. Although Polish mathematicians had worked out how to read Enigma messages and had shared this information with the British, the Germans increased its security at the outbreak of war by changing the cipher system daily.

8 comments. Well, lemme tell you it wasn't just hard to break. Special rotary dials in the machine turned every time a given key was pressed, causing the machine to output a different cyphered letter each time.

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Here's the reason, It was the greatest encryption device in history.

3 years ago.

Here is a previous answer I gave to this question: The Enigma machine was invented in 1918 and was changed in 1930 by the German military addition of the plugboard.

100% Upvoted. the enigma code was hard to crack because the Germans would change the code everyday. This was the version that was extremely difficult to break.

It was impossible to break manually. Why was it so hard to crack? u/cjc122449. The Germans were convinced that Enigma output could not be broken, so they used the machine for all sorts of communications - on the battlefield, at sea, in … 1.

So in some sense, it's not surprising that the creators of Enigma came up with a hard to crack machine: they took this basic template of repeat applications of a relatively easy transformation.

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Archived. 158,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible solutions, yet the Allies were eventually able to crack its code.. ELI5: how the german enigma machine worked. The Enigma machine was designed so that no single keypress ever produced the same coded letter. Why was it so hard to crack? ELI5: how the german enigma machine worked. Good question!