Polish Breakthrough
In the 1920s the German military began using a 3-rotor Enigma, whose security was increased in 1930 by the addition of a plugboard. The Polish Cipher Bureau sought to break it due to the increasing threat that Poland faced from Germany. On 1 September 1932, a 27-year-old Polish mathematician, Marian Rejewski, joined the Bureau along with two fellow Poznań University mathematics graduates, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki. Their first task was to solve the logical structure of the military Enigma, which differed from the commercial version.
In December 1932, the Bureau received from Gustave Bertrand of French Military Intelligence, two German documents and two pages of Enigma daily keys which had been obtained by the French from an agent who worked at Germany's Cipher Office in Berlin, Hans Thilo-Schmidt. This material enabled Rejewski to achieve "one of the most important breakthroughs in cryptologic history" by using the theory of permutations and groups to work out the Enigma scrambler wiring.
Rejewski found that the connections between the military Enigma's keyboard and the entry ring were not, as in the commercial Enigma, in the order of the keys on a German typewriter. He made an inspired correct guess that it was in alphabetical order. Britain's Dilly Knox was astonished when he learned, in July 1939, that the arrangement was so simple. Having worked out the logical structure of the machine, Rejewski had replicas made, which he called 'Enigma doubles'.
Read more about this topic: Cryptanalysis Of The Enigma
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