Spain donates Enigma gear that kick-started Brit code-breaking

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/27/spanish_civil_war_enigmas/

By John Leyden
The Register
27th March 2012

A pair of historic Enigma machines used during the Spanish Civil War 
have been donated to Britain.

The machines played a role in an untold chapter of British wartime 
code-breaking history: the early 20th-century kit encoded messages that, 
once intercepted, helped boffins crack German military encryption at 
Bletchley Park in the Second World War.

When Hitler and Mussolini sent troops to fight alongside Franco's 
Spanish nationalists during the civil war in the 1930s, the Germans used 
sets of commercially available albeit modified Enigma machines to 
establish secure communications with their Condor Legion.

Britain had purchased an off-the-shelf Enigma machine in 1927 - and 
although the nation's top experts understood how it worked, they had no 
opportunity to break Hitler's encrypted messages because the German 
military's signals didn't reach Britain, BBC News reports.

[...]


______________________________________________________________________________
Certified Ethical Hacker and CISSP training with Expanding Security gives
the best training and support.  Get a free live class invite weekly.  Best
program, best price. www.ExpandingSecurity.com/PainPill