The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily.

During the Second World War, the Germans used what they thought to be an uncrackable encryption system.

And it was a really good encryption system, and for the longest time, the Allies had a difficult time cracking the code.

However, thanks to brilliant code breakers,

a powerful computing machine, and German mistakes, the Allies were finally able to break the code.

Learn more about the Enigma Code and how it was broken on this episode of Everything Everywhere

Daily.

Thank you. Code and Ciphers have always been an important part of warfare.

Commanders needed to give orders to units

that couldn't fall into the hands of enemies. If you remember back to my episode on cryptography,

cipher systems of some sort have been used since ancient history. There is evidence of some sort

of encrypted writing in ancient Mesopotamia, India, Greece, and Rome. For most of history, encryption was tied to a physical

document. You could hide or conceal a document so the enemy wouldn't even know you had a document.

However, with the advent of wireless radio communications, things changed. You could send

communications quickly over long distances, but the communication could be picked up by

anyone who was listening. When you know the enemy is going to have access to your encrypted

communications, you need to have an extremely robust encryption system. There is a system that is

extremely secure known as a one-time pad. A one-time pad is a system of random characters that are shared between

two parties, and the system is guaranteed 100% unbreakable. However, there's a catch. You can only

use it once, and you really can't use it with multiple parties. If a central command wanted to communicate

with multiple distributed units, you have to give

everyone the same one-time pads.

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