America’s Unbroken World War 2 Cipher Machine

Jason Bowling
Focus On History
Published in
10 min readJan 7, 2020

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How SIGABA’s Encryption Stayed Secure As Enigma Fell

SIGABA’s keyboard and printer. Photo by the author at the National Cryptology Museum

The story of America’s SIGABA cipher machine, which resisted the efforts of the best Axis cryptographers and provided secure communications throughout the war, is not nearly as well known as that of the German Enigma. Though it used very similar technology to the Enigma, it employed a key difference which was primarily the invention…

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