The Nazi's had Enigma to encrypt messages, what did the Allies have?

by anyone4apint

I have been reading the story of Enigma and find it fascinating, how it lead to the birth of modern computing, the sheer brilliance of cracking it, its importance in the war.... incredible story. However, it made me wonder, how did the Allies encrypt their messages?

viscraoul

TL;DR After enigma was cracked, the British created their own unbreakable code called Typex. This code fixed the fatal flaw of enigma; a letter could never be itself.

The way the enigma machine worked was through a series of rotors. In the factory which made enigma machines, the person building it was told to pick three rotors out of a box of five (giving 60 possibilities as to what the code may be). Each rotor has 26 starting places on it (26x26x26=17576. (with the 3 out of 5 rotors, that makes 1054560 possibilities)). Military machines had a plugboard, with 10 wires to connect 10 pairs of letters (26!/6!/10!/2^10=150738274937250 (with the previous two factors, that equates to 158962555217826360000)).

With that number of possibilities, the code seemed unbreakable. But the way it was broken was that, each letter contained a weather report (Wetterbericht) and/or a salute to their leader (Heil Hitler). Because of the way the enigma machine was built, and the way it was wired, meant that the W in Wetterbericht could never be a W (the same thing applies to the e, t, etc.). After they cracked it, the British took the code for enigma and made sure that the W in Wetterbericht could sometimes be a W. This was called Typex.