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Flaw in the Enigma Code - Numberphile

Numberphile · 5.4M views · 2013-01-14 · 10:58

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Overview

Numberphile's Dr James Grime explains the flaw in the Enigma machine, namely that a letter could never be encrypted to itself, and how that helped the Allies break the code. It touches on the Bombe and Alan Turing.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as a short, clear explanation of why Enigma was breakable and how search-space elimination works.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2013–2025

Topics

CryptographyRecreational & visual mathHistory of computing
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enigmaworld war iialan turingbombe

What people said

robaato · 2025-08 · Recommendation

There's the entertaining bit in the film The Imitation Game (the breaking of Enigma code by Alan Turing) where they realised that a weakness was the daily weather report always containing the words "weatherreport" and "heil bloody hitler" (with obvious addition!) [LINK] or longer version: [LINK] Also a more proper explanation: [VIDEO]

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DarkmSparks · 2025-01 · Recommendation

none of it is "brute force", GNFS is a process that rapidly excludes numbers from the search space that cannot be the answer, in principle similar to the way they broke enigma. numberphile has a great video on that one [VIDEO] Also, taking the OP as a "worse case", afaik: 512bit = $8 so 1024 = 8^2 = $64 2048 = 8^2^2 = $4,096 4096 = 8^2^2 = $16,777,216 noting $8 for 512 seems very expensive to me.

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iClaudiusX · 2017-09 · Recommendation

In this case, a more relevant example from World War II might be the exploitation of flaws in the Enigma machine, namely: 1) the re-use of common phrases in weather reports, and 2) the fact that a letter could not be encoded as itself in the ciphertext, providing a mechanism of contradiction that drastically sped up elimination of possible settings [LINK] Numberphile gives a nice, succinct explanation [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Numberphile, played through YouTube.

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