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By 1938 Rejewski had invented a device, the cryptologic bomb, and Henryk Zygalski had devised his sheets, to make the cipher-breaking more efficient. In December 1932 it was "broken" by mathematician Marian Rejewski at the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau, using mathematical permutation group theory combined with French-supplied intelligence material obtained from a German spy. The German plugboard-equipped Enigma became Nazi Germany's principal crypto-system. 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.
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![german enigma machine german enigma machine](https://natedsanders.com/ItemImages/000054/Enigma%20Machine%2057929b_lg.jpeg)
Good operating procedures, properly enforced, would have made the plugboard Enigma machine unbreakable.
#German enigma machine portable#
The Enigma machines were a family of portable cipher machines with rotor scramblers. This yielded military intelligence which, along with that from other decrypted Axis radio and teleprinter transmissions, was given the codename Ultra. Cryptanalysis of the Enigma ciphering system enabled the western Allies in World War II to read substantial amounts of Morse-coded radio communications of the Axis powers that had been enciphered using Enigma machines.