Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s recovery of the wiring of two rotors from an enigma D machine

Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

Mathematics

Publication Date

9-21-2022

Abstract

In January 1940, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted numerous messages that were encrypted on a commercial Enigma D machine using the same key. By solving these messages in depth and examining the resulting cipher alphabets for each position of the rotors, the Cryptanalytic Unit, headed by Elizebeth Smith Friedman, was able to recover the wiring of two of the rotors. This paper explains Friedman’s methods in detail and uses them to determine the wiring of two rotors from an Enigma M3 machine.

Comments

This article was originally published in Cryptologia. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Due to copyright restrictions, this article is not available for free download from ScholarWorks @ CWU.

Journal

Cryptologia

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