ChatGPT vs. Nazi Encryption: Why Enigma Wouldn’t Stand a Chance Today

In the 1930s and 40s, mathematician Alan Turing and other Allied cryptologists devoted monumental efforts to break the German encryption machine, the Enigma, which Nazis used to send secret messages during World War II. Today, however, modern computers and artificial intelligence could break the Enigma code without breaking a sweat, as reported by The Guardian. “Enigma wouldn’t stand up to modern computing and statistics,” Michael Wooldridge, a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, told the publication. In the 1930s, Polish cryptologists began the arduous task of decoding Enigma, which at one point had 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible solutions. They successfully developed “bombas,” also called “bombes”—machines that could decrypt messages encrypted by Enigma. Germany increased the complexity of Enigma’s encryption, however, and as the threat of German invasion loomed, Poland’s intelligence bureau handed over their work to the British and French. The British ... Read full article.