ANN: obfuscate

[Paul Rubin]

Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>> The predecessor of the Enigma was cracked by Polish scientists years
>> before WW2 started....
> I believe that all of Enigma was eventually cracked cos of two major
> flaws.

I think it never would have been cracked if it hadn't been cracked
(whether by the Brits or the Poles) before the war started, using
commercial versions of the Enigma that they had access to.  The military
Enigma and its operating methods got more sophisticated as the war went
on, and the cryptanalysts were able to keep up with it by incrementally
improving techniques that they were already using at scale.  If they
were suddenly confronted with the full-blown military system in the
middle of the war, it would have been a lot harder to do anything about
it.  At least, most of the Enigma-related books I've read give that
impression and even come out and say such things.

> Further, the far more powerful Geheimscreiber was also cracked at
> Bletchley by using Colossus.  Sorry some years since I read the book
> about this so can't remember the title or author.

See  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
That was almost at the end of the war though.