![What Would You Do With a Time Machine? [480x576 - 32KB]](https://pic8.co/sh/HTdClT.jpg){kind=link}
Was enigma truly flawed? As mainstream history tells me, that the only reason that the Allies cracked it was because the Germans using it got lazy and were taking shortcuts. Had they not taken these shortcuts, the Enigma cipher would have remained uncracked.
If letters could represent themselves, it would have taken a lot more oomph to crack.
This seems like an oversimplification, if the fault of Enigma truly was that it was so overengineered that in actual field use the Germans took shortcuts on the ciphering process that made it crackable.
The Germans are certainly renown for overengineering everything.
The device itself was amazing, and without mechanical help, wasn't crackable. The wartime effort to develop a single-purpose computer along with the Polish effort to provide the allied forces with an Enigma device are what did it in. The flaw was merely the hook the allies used once a device was in hand.
If the Polish resistance hadn't got their hands on an Enigma, then it probably would have remained a mystery, much like the Code Talkers did to the NAZI forces.
So it's not really an oversimplification, it's more of a hardware zero-day exploit, but again, without a machine in hand the effort to decrypt would have theoretically taken a lot longer.
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