> Question for the Enigma folks....If you knew the wheel settings used to
> encrypt a message, could you then decrypt it? If so then Enigma is
> Symmetrical. If not, and a different wheel set is used to decrypt the
> message then that's one impressive machine (and I hope they kept the
> inventor's brain in a jar somewhere ;-)).
Enigma was a symmetrical encryption machine. The British intelligence had
one Enigma machine at Bletchley Park (where Turing worked), and one of the
things they always wanted to find was how it was currently set, because if
they could code then they could decode.
Also IIRC from my Maths lectures, asymmetric encryption was only
discovered in the 70s.
Charles
