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 in World War II. The strength of the security of the ciphers that were produced by the Enigma machine was a product of the large numbers associated with the scrambling process. However, the way that Enigma was used by the Germans meant that, if the settings for one day (or whatever period was represented by each row of the setting sheet) were established, the rest of the messages for that network on that day could quickly be deciphered. The security of Enigma ciphers did have fundamental weaknesses that proved helpful to cryptanalysts. Enigma featured the major operational convenience of being