Abstract
The volume of cipher traffic that was made possible by radio showed the need for vastly increased security, speed and accuracy in both enciphering and deciphering messages. The use of mechanical and electromechanical machines to do the encipherment was a logical outgrowth of this need. The first electromechanical rotor cipher machines began to appear right after World War I and the next three decades saw their steady improvement in both complexity and speed. The Enigma, the Typex and the M-134C/SIGABA were the epitome of these machines and the efforts to create and cryptanalyze them led us into the computer age. This chapter examines the history of cipher machines in the 20th century and looks in some detail at the cryptographic construction of the Enigma and the M-134C/SIGABA.
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Notes
- 1.
Patent 6,097,812, granted 1 August 2000.
- 2.
Patent 6,175,625, granted 16 January 2001.
- 3.
Patent 6,130,946, granted 10 October 2000.
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Dooley, J.F. (2013). The Coming of the Machines: 1918–1945. In: A Brief History of Cryptology and Cryptographic Algorithms. SpringerBriefs in Computer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01628-3_7
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