Cryptanalysis of the Enigma immense problem and it gave a great deal of trouble. Work on a high speed machine had been started by Wynn-Williams of the TRE late in 1941 and some nine months later Harold Keen of BTM started work independently. Early in 1942, Bletchley Park were a long way from possessing a high speed machine of any sort. Eventually, after a long period of being unable to decipher U-boat messages, a source of cribs was found. This was the Kurzsignale (short signals), a code which the German navy used to minimize the duration of transmissions, thereby reducing the risk of being
Cryptanalysis of the Enigma current on the way out to the lamp panel. To decipher German military Enigma messages, the following information would need to be known. Logical structure of the machine (unchanging) Internal settings (usually changed less frequently than external settings) External settings (usually changed more frequently than internal settings) Discovering the logical structure of the machine may be called "breaking" it, a one-off process except when changes or additions were made to the machines. Finding the internal and external settings for one or more messages may be called "solving" - although breaking is often used for this process as well. The various