Introduction: From WWII Codes to Today's Boardrooms
In the 1940s, the Allied codebreakers at Bletchley Park raced against time to crack the infamous Enigma machine. What seemed unbreakable turned out to be vulnerable—not because the machine itself was flawed, but because its operators made mistakes.
Today's businesses face a parallel challenge. Instead of naval convoys and battle strategies, the secrets at stake are proprietary algorithms, client data, pricing models, and product roadmaps. Just like Enigma, these modern trade secrets are valuable only so long as they remain confidential.
This article explores what the fall of Enigma can teach us about trade secret protection, cybersecurity, and why "reasonable efforts" under the law are essential.
History of the Enigma Machine and Lessons for Protecting Trade Secrets Today
The atmosphere was tense in a 1940s cramped hut at Bletchley Park, occupied by Allied codebreakers working around the clock to decode intercepted Nazi messages. Cigarette smoke hung thick in the air as they bent over the encrypted messages, sweat beading on foreheads under the harsh light that illuminated dozens of notepads filled with ciphers, prototype machines, and fingers racing across the page. Each moment the code remained a mystery led to ships sunk, more crews missing, more lives lost. The goal was simple — crack the Enigma machine code before the Nazis claim more lives.
The Enigma Machine, a device made of rotors and wires, was the backbone of the German military communication system. By using this typewriter-like device, they were able to scramble each message (using a different code each day) into literally billions of possibilities - making it "unbreakable." These days, businesses won't find themselves in the life-or-death codebreaking situations seen during WW2, but they will battle enemy forces nearly every day.
Hackers and insiders vie for one thing - information. And like the infamous Enigma machine used by the Nazis, the modern business has its weaknesses. If not careful, your business's information, trade secrets, and more, can be exploited if not properly protected.
In this article, we'll discuss how a group of British codebreakers took down the most challenging encryption device of its age and what you can learn about protecting your business's intellectual property from their mistakes and victories.
Further reading on the history of Enigma: Bletchley Park Museum (https://bletchleypark.org.uk) and National Cryptologic Museum (https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/museum/).
The Enigma Machine: The Ultimate Secret Keeper
Arthur Scherbius, a German electrical engineer, developed the Enigma machine in the aftermath of WW1 with the goal of helping businesses, banks, and diplomatic offices protect their sensitive information. He patented the design around 1918,making it available for commercial use by 1923. However, by 1942 the device had been adopted by the German military and issued across all branches of their armed forces — from the Army and Navy to the Air Force and Intelligence agencies.
The early versions of the Enigma machine combined daily key sheets, three rotors, reflectors, and a plugboard to code each message. By February of 1942, the German U-boat fleet introduced a more complex system involving four rotors — known as the M4 — which added another layer of difficulty for the Allies.
The addition of the fourth rotor sent the number of possible settings to staggering levels. This set Allied codebreakers — who had seemingly been making headway toward breaking the Enigma — back to square one. During the Battle of the Atlantic, the new M4 was deployed on U-boats for the first time, enabling German operators to coordinate mass attacks on Allied fleets. American and British forces scrambled as millions of tons of food, oil, and weapons bound for Britain sank to the bottom of the ocean, along with thousands of sailors.
Yet this powerful coding system, so dangerous and devastating, had its drawbacks. The daily key sheets specified settings — rotor order, ring settings, plugboard pairings, and initial rotor positions — that crew members had to use before encrypting their messages. Crucially, the operator on the decryption side had to have the exact same settings. Because the system required new positions each day, the potential for error was high. Signal staff, especially during battle, checked and rechecked their machines with painstaking care to ensure their messages went through correctly.
Once the machine had been set to that day's specifications, the radio men plugged their message into the typewriter-like device. With each key press, the rotors shifted, creating a polyalphabetic cipher. The plugboard then swapped pairs of letters before and after they passed through the rotors and illuminated a lamp corresponding to the ciphertext letter of the day — creating trillions of possibilities for each input. The illuminated character was recorded by a second operator and sent via Morse code. On the receiving end, the message could only be decrypted if the machine was configured with the identical daily key.
The precision required to encrypt and decrypt messages correctly was itself a vulnerability. But an even bigger weakness remained: the human operators. The German Navy relied heavily on codebooks, which were printed in water-soluble red ink so they could be quickly destroyed if capture seemed imminent. Despite these precautions, Allied forces managed to seize intact materials during the loss of U-110 when the crew failed to destroy their codebooks.
This seizure, along with other operational lapses, gave the Allies the tools they needed to finally unravel the Enigma's secrets.
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