page_title: Cryptanalysis of the Enigma
section_title: M4 (German Navy 4-rotor Enigma)
hierarchical_section_title: Cryptanalysis of the Enigma / World War II / German Naval Enigma / M4 (German Navy 4-rotor Enigma)
caption_attribution_description: Four rotor German naval Enigma on display at Bletchley Park.
context_page_description: Cryptanalysis of the Enigma ciphering system enabled the western Allies in World War II to read substantial amounts of Morse-coded radio communications of the Axis powers that had been enciphered using Enigma machines. This yielded military intelligence which, along with that from other decrypted Axis radio and teleprinter transmissions, was given the codename Ultra. This was considered by western Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower to have been "decisive" to Allied victory.
  The Enigma machines were a family of portable cipher machines with rotor scramblers. Good operating procedures, properly enforced, would have made the plugboard Enigma machine unbreakable. However, most of the German military forces, secret services, and civilian agencies that used Enigma employed poor operating procedures, and it was these poor procedures that allowed the Enigma machines to be reverse-engineered and the ciphers to be read.
  The German plugboard-equipped Enigma became Nazi Germany's principal crypto-system. It was broken by the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in December 1932, with the aid of French-supplied intelligence material obtained from a German spy.
context_section_description: On 1 February 1942, the Enigma messages to and from Atlantic U-boats, which Bletchley Park called '"Shark," became significantly different from the rest of the traffic, which they called "Dolphin."
  This was because a new Enigma version had been brought into use. It was a development of the 3-rotor Enigma with the reflector replaced by a thin rotor and a thin reflector. Eventually, there were two fourth-position rotors that were called Beta and Gamma and two thin reflectors, Bruno and Caesar which could be used in any combination. These rotors were not advanced by the rotor to their right, in the way that rotors I to VIII were.
  The introduction of the fourth rotor did not catch Bletchley Park by surprise, because captured material dated January 1941 had made reference to its development as an adaptation of the 3-rotor machine, with the fourth rotor wheel to be a reflector wheel. Indeed, because of operator errors, the wiring of the new fourth rotor had already been worked out.
  This major challenge could not be met by using existing methods and resources for a number of reasons.
  The work on the Shark cipher would have to be independent of the continuing work on messages in the Dolphin cipher.
  Solving Shark keys on 3-rotor bombes would have taken 50 to 100 times as long as an average Air Force or Army job.
  U-boat cribs at this time were extremely poor.
  It seemed, therefore, that effective, fast, 4-rotor bombes were the only way forward. This was an immense problem and it gave a great deal of trouble. Work on a high speed machine had been started by Wynn-Williams of the TRE late in 1941 and some nine months later Harold Keen of BTM started work independently. Early in 1942, Bletchley Park were a long way from possessing a high speed machine of any sort.
  Eventually, after a long period of being unable to decipher U-boat messages, a source of cribs was found. This was the Kurzsignale (short signals), a code which the German navy used to minimize the duration of transmissions, thereby reducing the risk of being located by high-frequency direction finding techniques. The messages were only 22 characters long and were used to report sightings of possible Allied targets. A copy of the code book had been captured from U-110 on 9 May 1941. A similar coding system was used for weather reports from U-boats, the Wetterkurzschlüssel, (Weather Short Code Book). A copy of this had been captured from U-559 on 29 or 30 October 1942. These short signals had been used for deciphering 3-rotor Enigma messages and it was discovered that the new rotor had a neutral position at which it, and its matching reflector, behaved just like a 3-rotor Enigma reflector. This allowed messages enciphered at this neutral position to be deciphered by a 3-rotor machine, and hence deciphered by a standard bombe. Deciphered Short Signals provided good material for bombe menus for Shark. Regular deciphering of U-boat traffic restarted in December 1942.
caption: The German Navy 4-rotor Enigma machine (M4) which was introduced for U-boat traffic on 1 February 1942.
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