(See: War Hackers: Why Breaking Enigma is Still Relevant to Cybersecurity Today). With this exaggerated belief in the inviolability of the Enigma system, its users never stopped to think – or even to test – whether it could really withstand an organised attack using mathematics rather than the ‘brute force’ approach of attempting to test all those possibilities in succession. The three-rotor Enigma had 3 x 10 114 possible cipher patterns. After all, there were theoretically 3 x 10 114 possible cipher patterns which the basic three-rotor machine could create, and testing all these possibilities one after the other is beyond modern computing power even now, and so was well beyond anyone’s wildest dreams during WW2. It seems that the Enigma machine – or, rather, its ciphers – were seen in Germany as unbreakable. Masterman was the Chair of the ‘Twenty Committee’, and his 1972 book revealed how the whole German spy network in UK was controlled by the British. Surely, they say, there were German spies in Britain who would have been able to pick up some clues, and to report their findings back to Germany? It often comes as a surprise to them when I tell them that, firstly, all the German spies in Britain were directly controlled by the British, and that, secondly, British achievements were not known of in Germany until the 1970s. ![]() I am often asked whether the Germans had any idea that the British were successfully breaking Enigma during the war.
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