A review on mathematical strength and analysis of Enigma
This is an incremental review of historical cryptography, relevant for those studying encryption history and mathematical cryptanalysis.
The paper reviews the mathematics and mechanics of the Enigma machine, analyzing its security strength and how Polish mathematicians exploited flaws using permutation group theory to decipher messages during World War II.
In this review article, we discussed the Mathematics and mechanics behind the Enigma machine with an analysis of security strength. The German army used the Enigma machine during the second world war to encrypt communications. Due to its complexity, the encryption done by the Enigma Machine was assumed to be almost unbreakable. However, the Polish believed that people with good background and deep knowledge of science and mathematics would have a better chance to break the encryption done by Enigma. They appointed twenty mathematicians from Poznan University to work on this problem at the Polish Cipher Bureau. Three of those, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski were able to exploit certain flaws in the encryption, and by using permutation group theory finally managed to decipher the Enigma messages. The mathematics discovered by them is presented here.