La máquina Enigma era un mecanismo de cifrado
rotativo utilizado tanto para cifrado como para descifrado, ampliamente
utilizada de varios modos en Europa desde los tempranos años 1920 en adelante.
Su fama se la debe a haber sido adoptada por muchas fuerzas militares de
Alemania desde 1930 en adelante. Su facilidad de manejo y su supuesta
inviolabilidad fueron las principales razones para su amplio uso. Su cifrado,
fue roto, y la lectura de la información que ofrecía en los mensajes que no
protegió es a veces reconocida como la causa para acabar al menos un año antes
la Segunda Guerra Mundial de lo que hubiera podido ser de otro modo.
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_%28m%C3%A1quina%29
Name for a machine used by the
Germans to encrypt and decrypt secret messages in World War II.
http://www.nsa.gov/kids/ciphers/ciphe00006.cfm
In the history of
cryptography, the Enigma was a portable cipher machine used to encrypt and
decrypt secret messages. More precisely, Enigma was a family of related
electro-mechanical rotor machines
comprising a variety of different models.
The Enigma was used
commercially from the early 1920s on, and was also adopted by the military and
governmental services of a number of nations
most famously by Nazi Germany before and during World War II.
The German military model,
the Wehrmacht Enigma, is the version most commonly discussed. The machine has
gained notoriety because Allied cryptologists were able to decrypt a large number
of messages that had been enciphered on the machine. The intelligence gained
through this source codenamed ULTRA was a significant aid to the Allied war
effort. The exact influence of ULTRA is debated, but a typical assessment is
that the end of the European war was hastened by two years because of the decryption
of German ciphers.
Although the Enigma cipher
has cryptographic weaknesses, it was, in practice, only their combination with
other significant factors which allowed codebreakers to read messages: mistakes
by operators, procedural flaws, and the occasional captured machine or
codebook.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine