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. Cote 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 incredible, 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

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