Cryptanalysis of the Enigma by the letters on the top row of the Enigma keyboard. So, "continuation of message sent at 2330" was represented as "FORTYWEEPYYWEEPY". "Cribs" were fundamental to the British approach to solving Enigma keys, but guessing the plaintext for a message was a highly skilled business. So in 1940 Stuart Milner-Barry set up a special "Crib Room" in Hut 8. Foremost amongst the knowledge needed for identifying cribs was the text of previous decrypts. Bletchley Park maintained detailed indexes of message preambles, of every person, of every ship, of every unit, of every weapon, of every technical term and of repeated
Cryptanalysis of the Enigma Enigma machine unbreakable. However, most of the German military forces, secret services and civilian agencies that used Enigma employed poor operating procedures, and it was these poor procedures that allowed the Enigma machines to be reverse-engineered and the ciphers to be read. The German plugboard-equipped Enigma became Nazi Germany's principal crypto-system. It was broken by the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in December 1932, with the aid of French-supplied intelligence material obtained from a German spy. A month before the outbreak of World War II, at a conference held near Warsaw, the Polish Cipher Bureau shared its Enigma-breaking techniques and