Customer Reviews

The German Enigma Cipher Machine: Beginnings, Success, and Ultimate Failure (Artech House Computer Security)

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This is quite possibly the best book ever published or ever will be published on the Enigma machine. It is a collection of articles from the magazine Cryptologia. Cryptologia is a professional journal devoted to all aspects of cryptology. Down through the years they have published articles on Enigma written by the people who were there at the time and doing the code breaking, as well as by scholars who have specialized in either cryptology or the history of that aspect of World War II.

This book is a collection of articles from the magazine. Some of them:

- An Interview with Marian Rejewski, the lead Polish cryptologist who first broke the Enigma, built the Polish Bombe that allowed the British to read the Enigma trafic.

- An article by William P. Bundy, the commander of the Americans at Bletchley during World War II, subsequently worked for the CIA and Department of Defense.

- A bit over a hundred pages of the book reprint reviews of virtually every book published dealing with Enigma, codes, or intelligence during World War II.

- There is also a little bit on Magic, the breaking of the Japanese codes, particularily in respect to the distribution of information to Roosevelt.

- There are a few more tidbits about the American rotor encryption machine SIGABA - We are still waiting for the full story of this machine.

- A discussion on what the history of World War II would have been without ULTRA or MAGIC

The Enigma story is capsule in time. It was an electromechanical machine. In World War I the "electro" part wasn't developed well enough to enable it to have been built. Shortly after World War II the mechanical part was rendered obsolete by purely "electro" devices called computers. Using a modern PC to break Enigma would be a trivial exercise. And the encryption techniques used by modern programs like PGP would have been totally imposible to break with the equipment avaiable during World War II.

As I said at the beginning, this is a fabulous book. It's not going to be a #1 best seller (in fact Amazon lists its sales rank as #283,536), it's expensive, and it probably won't be in print all that long. If this is your kind of thing, get it quickly.

In the world of information systems, software technologies are frequently obsolete within a decade, and hardware in less time than that. So a book about an 80-year-old cryptographic device would seem to be as useful as a maintenance guide for a Model T. There is much to learn in this fascinating account, however.

The German Enigma Cipher Machine is the story of one of the most notable pieces of security hardware ever made, an encoding device that looked like a small typewriter. The Germans used it, primarily during World War II, to send confidential communications. In their hubris, the Germans believed that the Enigma was utterly unbreakable and refused to believe otherwise even when their communiqués were being compromised. The Allied Powers were able to break the code after they acquired an Enigma machine and brought together a team of analysts from diverse countries to tease out its secrets.

That's the basic story. This book is a collection of various articles from a cryptology journal called Cryptologia. Chapters are written by those who created the Enigma, worked to crack it, or studied it afterwards. Though many of the chapters are highly technical, the book still has enough valuable information for readers without a deep background in encryption.

While the Enigma is dead and buried, the problems that doomed it-poor physical security, user error, and overreliance on the technology-are still relevant today. The Model T inventor's statement that "History is more or less bunk" to the contrary, Enigma provides lasting lessons.

I read this authoritative book on enigma.Very very detailed, written by famous specialists on cryptology and codebreaking.I highly recommend this book,for those who are looking for an ultimate book on enigma cipher machine.

I purchased this book for a graduate school research paper, thinking (from its price) that it would be a detailed narrative concerning the Enigma machine - however it is not. It is a compilation of Cryptologia magazine articles including letters to the editor and an Enigma brochure. I also purchased David Kahn's The Codebreakers but it was too full of info with Enigma references interspersed for me to wade through it all for a research paper limited to the German Naval Engima machine and procedures in 1939.
This book has separate chapters which consist of Cryptologia magazine articles:
David Kahn's The Significance of Codebreaking and Intelligence in Allied Strategy and Tactics
The Enigma Part 1: Historical Perspectives (C.A. Deavours & Jamie Reeds)
The Ultra Conference (David Kahn)
Why Germany Lost the Code War (David Kahn)
In Memoriam Marian Rejewski (Christopher Kasparek & Richard A. Woytak)
A Conversation with Marian Rejewski (Richard A. Woytak)
Bombe! I Could Hardly Believe It (Robert I. Atha)
Who Was the Third Man at Pyry? (Patrick Beesly)
Some of My Wartime Experiences (William P. Bundy)
Bletchley Park 1941-1945 (Wiliam F. Clarke)
British-American Cryptanalytic Cooperation and an Unprecedented Admission by Winston Churchill (Louis Kruh)
From the Archives: A Bletchley Park Assessment of German Intelligence on Torch (Ralph Erskine)
British Intelligence in the Second World War: An Overview (F. H. Hinsley)
A New Challenge for an Old Enigma-Buster (Wladyslaw Kazaczuk)
Why Was Safford Pessimistic About Breaking the German Enigma Cipher Machine in 1942 (Louis Kruh)
Letters to the Editor Regarding the Safford Article (Colin Burke and Ralph Erskine)
Roosevelt, Magic and Ultra (David Kahn)
An Enigma Chronology (David Kahn)
Ultra and Some U.S. Navy Carrier Operations (Ralph Erskine)
The Counterfactual History of No Ultra (Harry Hinsley)
The First Naval Enigma Decrypts of World War II (Ralph Erskine)
Letter to the Editor Regarding Counterfactual History of No Ultra Article (Ralph Erskine)
An Error in the History of Rotor Encryption Devices (Friedrich L. Bauer)
The Glow-Lamp Ciphering and Deciphering machine: Enigma from the Archieves (Enigma Sales Brochure)
The Commerical Enigma: Beginnings of the Machine Cryptography (Louis Kruh and Cipher Deavours)
How Statistics Led the Germans to Believe Enigma Secure and Why They Were Wrong: Neglecting the Practical Mathematics of Cipher Machines (R. A. Ratcliff).

If you are an Enigma, Cryptography or World War II buff, this book may complement your collection, however, much of its content could be found on the Internet in other articles by the same authors that contain just about the same information.

As an Enigma enthusiast (and Enigma-E builder/owner), I would love to read this book - I have seven or eight other books on cryptography, with four of those being specifically about the Enigma. But - this title is just too expensive for my (currently salary-less) budget. What on earth makes a book cost over a hundred dollars?

It's been on my Amazon shopping list for probably two years but the price only seems to go up - nnnnk wrong direction folks.