Overview

The Germans invented a machine that looked like a typewriter to encode strategic messages during World War II. Cryptanalysis of this Enigma ciphering machine had an important impact on the outcome of the war. On January 18, 2024, Britain's GCHQ spy agency celebrated the 80th anniversary of Colossus, putting the spotlight on a code- breaking computer which helped defeat Hitler's Germany and was so significant it was kept secret for decades.

Why was Enigma so hard to crack?

If you have an enigma machine and a message that was encoded by an enigma, you would think that feeding the encoded message back into enigma would allow you to decode it. However, the design of enigma made it so you needed to know the inital settings of all parts of enigma in order to correctly decode the message. Well how many possiblilites could there be? Let's look at how combinatorics can explain this for us.

So in other words... there were a lot of possible start configurations. Way too many to be able to crack the solution using brute force.