COIS3820H

History of Computing
WW2:
Enigma Machine
Bletchley Park
The Enigma Machine
Encryption device used by the
German army since the 1920s
Type a letter on the keyboard,
read off the coded letter and send
it in morse code
Comprised a series of rotors or wheels, each with 26 contacts on either
face, linked by complex wiring
Rotors move on every key press; mapping changed over time
Rotor output went through a plugboard which swapped letters over to add
further level of encryption
The Enigma Machine
The Enigma Machine
Enigma keys were changed regularly; the key comprised
• plugboard wiring
• initial rotor positions
To send a message on an N rotor machine
• pick N letters, code them twice with the rotors in the initial position
• arrange the rotors so that the chosen letters are visible and code the rest
of the message
• send the 2N character header, then the message

Many, many key combinations were possible, but Enigma had one flaw - it
never coded a letter as itself
The Polish Work
The Polish Secret Service cracked Enigma in 1932
• a machine was delayed at Customs in 1928 and examined
• team of 3 mathematicians began training in cryptography
• in 1931 a clerk in the German MOD supplied an instruction book and
sample coded and decoded messages
The Poles developed the first “Bombes” - special purpose machines
designed to recover Enigma codes from messages
In 1938 the Germans added 2 spare rotors - choose 3 from 5
• each rotor pattern needed a separate bombe, the Polish Government
couldn’t afford it, so work stopped
1939
British, French and Polish met to plan a response to Enigma
Bletchley Park was set up with the goal of penetrating the entire German
operational command structure
• mathematicians, chess players, logicians….
• around 10,000 eventually
Enigma was powerful, but broken
because it was used to describe, in
standard phrases, events that
Bletchley Park knew had happened
How to Break Enigma
After e.g. a German attack, look for messages from appropriate
areas/operators and hope to predict message content
• individual operators were monitored and their standard phrases noted
Suppose you have a message and an expected word
fftsnancksxinczgfnzpqqserclmmacjlucmabc
entscheidungsproblem
slide the word under the message looking for positions in which no letter maps
to itself
• such positions generate hypotheses about (part of) the Enigma
mapping
Turing’s Bombes
Hypotheses were input into new Bombes invented by Turing
• arrays of drums: columns mimic Enigma rotors, one column per letter in
the expected word
• the hypothesized mapping, the menu, is input via a plugboard on the
back
• searched space of possible enigma rotor settings
Turing’s Bombes
A switch under each column closed when a setting mapped the
hypothesized to the coded character
When all the switches closed at the same time the bombe stopped and a
possible Enigma setting could be read off
If the setting was right it would decode the whole message
• clerks tested each possible setting using replica Enigmas
By 1940 Enigma was broken on a large scale, 1,000 of messages a day -
The Ultra Secret
• individual German officers’ movements were tracked
• couldn’t appear to know anything only sent via Enigma
Fish
The Germans always suspected Enigma might be broken, so High
Command used the Geheimschreiber (secret writer), known at Bletchley as
“Fish” - The Lorenz Machine
Rotor-based design, but
much more complex
How Bletchley discovered
the structure of the machine
is still a secret
Max Newman realized that
the manual method used
to solve Fish was simulating it
Heath Robinson
Lorenz coded messages by replacing each letter with a number, then
adding a key string, generated by the machine, to the coded string
• each letter is mapped to many numbers
Robinson was an electro-mechanical machine designed to help decode
Fish
• subtracted coded messages from a key tape, for all possible
key/message positions
• if after subtraction some numbers were more common than others, the
key tape showed promise
- searching for a working key tape
Heath Robinson & Colossus
Robinson worked by comparing two looped paper tapes
• read by photoelectric cells
• subtracted and statistics done by valve circuits
The machine was physically unreliable, it was the first high speed tape
reader, but worked
• demonstrated the value of statistical methods
Newman moved to the Post Office Research Centre, to work with
electronics engineer Tommy Flowers, who designed an electronic version of
the Robinson machine - The Colossus
Colossus (1943)
1500 valves, more than ever used in a single machine before
Coded messages were read in on paper tape at 5000 characters/second
Fish’s 10 rotors were simulated by thyrotron rings; rings of valves wired so
that only one
can be on at any given time
Rotating drums/tape loops
were simulated by signals
circulating thyrotron rings
Colossus
Colossus was not programmable in the modern sense, everything was
hard wired.
• programmed to a limited degree by altering the wiring via plugboards
and switches
• used interactively, operators changed the program to search for the key
tape - “playing chess with the machine”
Colossus 2 (1944) could make use of conditional jumping between
alternative programs depending on counter outputs
• had all the components of a modern computer except memory (only
had one 5 character shift array)
• showed that valve machines were feasible
• 2500 valves
The ACE
At the end of the war it was felt that a national computer project was
needed; a Mathematics Division was set up at NPL (National Physical
Laboratory)
In February 1946 Turing had put forward a complete design of a stored
program computer
• the Automatic Computing Engine or ACE
•Used subprograms
•Used Abbreviated Computer Instructions (programming language?)
NPL wouldn’t let Turing build it
Didn’t know about Colossus – didn’t think it was possible to do
Couldn’t agree a deal with the PO Research Centre or Manchester
University, negotiations with Cambridge took ages
Although a Pilot ACE was working by the middle of 1950 it did not
become fully operational until 1952.
The Pilot ACE
The Pilot ACE was in use for 6 years, doing advanced engineering and
military calculations
• minimal hardware (for the time) and hard to program, but the fastest of
the early British computers
• 800 valves
• cards used for I/O via Hollerith machines
• memory of 128 32 bit words, extended to 352 words in 1951
• instruction times were highly dependent on the position in store of the
instruction
Turing’s design was obviously original,
not inspired by Von Neumann’s work in the USA
The Pilot ACE

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons