Secrets, Ciphers, and Cybersecurity: What the Enigma Machine Can Teach Us About Protecting Trade Secrets and Cybersecurity in Modern Times

Enigma Machine Protect Trade Secrets Cybersecurity

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 codeeach 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 theAtlantic, 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 beforeencrypting 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, checkedand 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-likedevice. With each key press, the rotors shifted, creating a polyalphabetic cipher. The plugboard then swapped pairs ofletters 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.

Cracks in the Code: How Enigma Was Defeated

Early Breakthroughs on Enigma Coding

By the early 1930s, the “unbreakable” code was quietly being unraveled right under the Nazis’ watchful eye. Not by Allied cryptanalysts, as you might think, but by an unassuming mathematician.

In 1932, Marian Rejewski, a Polish mathematician, began laying the groundwork for breaking Enigma. Using his mathematical training alongside limited documentation provided by French military intelligence, Rejewski carried out a blind reconstruction of the machine.

Applying permutation theory — the study of how sets of items can be rearranged — he deduced the wiring of the rotorsand reflectors, beginning with the right rotor and working his way across. Once these settings were identified, the Polish military commissioned replicas of the machine, known as “Enigma doubles.”

Rejewski then designed a device called the cyclometer, which analyzed the cycle patterns of all possible rotor positions.Over the course of a year, he and his team compiled a catalog of more than 105,000 entries mapping how Enigma’ssettings behaved. This massive reference cut daily key recovery time from hours or even days to about 15 minutes.

These breakthroughs proved the Germans’ prized coding machine was not without fault and laid the foundation for Britain’s later success in breaking Enigma.

Bletchley Park Story

Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, forcing Rejewski and his fellow cryptanalysts to share their methodsand replicas with the British military before fleeing the country. These insights became the foundation for the famous work at Bletchley Park. At the center of that effort was Alan Turing, a British mathematician and computer scientist. He invented the Bombe — a crucial turning point in decrypting Enigma that helped alter the course of history.

Mathematicians, linguists, engineers, and intelligence officers congregated at a Victorian mansion in the British countryside - Bletchley Park. This estate became a top-secret center where officers worked tirelessly to break interceptedGerman, Italian, and Japanese codes — ultimately shortening the war by two years according to some historians — and became the place where Turing and his team invented the Bombe.

An electro-mechanical device, it used logical deductions to figure out specific rotor and plugboard settings, rather thanmanually sorting through the thousands of possible configurations. According to The New Yorker on a good day, a Bombe could identify the correct settings in as little as an hour. For example, the Bombe made educated guesses using yet another German error - ending all their messages with Heil Hitler. This common phrase, along with a handful of others, provided anchor points for the Bombe to work from. By 1941, there were 18 Bombes operating around the clock allowing the Allies to read U-boat communications and avoid their targeted attacks.

Thus, the defeat of the Enigma wasn’t due to a single turning point or invention, but a series of human errors and small victories that built upon each other.

code breaking Lessons for Today’s Businesses

Just as the most advanced systems of WWII were unraveled by human error and weak safeguards, so too can the trade secrets and proprietary know how of today’s businesses. German forces often reused settings, failed to rotate rotors, and repeated patterns across multiple days—directly ignoring protocol. Similarly, modern employees often reuse passwords or skip updates, compromising the system.

Repeated plaintext words like Heil Hitler and weather reports made it easy for Allied cryptanalysts to find anchor pointsfor their decryption tactics. Today, generic email signatures, templated invoices, and repetitive login patterns play the same role—all of which leave systems vulnerable.

The mistakes made by German Enigma operators allowed for the capture of codebooks during the seizure of U-boats, turning the “unbreakable code” into a solvable puzzle. Today’s employees often write down passwords on sticky notes,lose laptops, or misplace USB drives—further weakening defenses to hackers. Even more dangerous is the risk of insider data theft. Failing to control access and train employees effectively can cost a company its trade secret protection.

All of this proves that security is only as strong as its weakest link. Just as the Enigma machine was thought to be foolproof, many systems today appear impenetrable—until carelessness exposes their flaws. Phishing, for example, is a modern “operator mistake.” One slip can bypass million-dollar firewalls, IT departments, and end-to-end encryption. The Enigma’s story, and its ultimate downfall, is a lesson in why trade secrets fail: not because the systems are weak, but because human execution is.

Trade Secrets and Code Systems: The Enigma Connection

The Enigma machine was not only a military tool but also a powerful metaphor for how trade secrets work. Like a trade secret, its value depended entirely on secrecy. Once its inner workings and daily key sheets were compromised, its strategic advantage vanished overnight.

Modern businesses face a similar challenge. Encryption algorithms, proprietary software, and confidential customer lists are today’s “code systems.” Just as Enigma relied on daily updates, multiple rotors, and disciplined operators, trade secrets depend on constant vigilance, layered defenses, and responsible employees.

Key similarities:

Value in Secrecy: Enigma’s worth collapsed once the Allies cracked its codes. A trade secret loses value the moment it becomes public.
Reasonable Safeguards: Enigma’s strict protocols mirror modern “reasonable efforts” in trade secret law—NDAs, secure systems, and access restrictions.
Human Weakness: Both Enigma and corporate trade secrets are most often compromised by operator mistakes or insider threats, not just external attackers.

The lesson is timeless: complex systems may be impressive, but without disciplined protection, secrets can and will be exposed. In most cases, the greatest risk to trade secrets involve the humans that come into contact with them: employees, vendors, and contractors.

See Harvard Business Review – The Risks of Trade Secret Theft for additional information.

Lessons from the Enigma Machine’s Downfall: Steps Businesses Can Take to Thwart Cybersecurity Bad Actors

The Enigma’s secrets were not undone by a flawed machine, but by human error and weak security execution. Even with millions spent on modern day firewalls, IT departments, and security systems, today’s secrets are just as vulnerable -however, companies have tools to combat attacks. If companies take the proper steps to document and safeguard their secrets and defense tactics, courts will recognize them as trade secrets - but if those steps are neglected, protections vanish. If companies view their secret protection as a living organism - growing and changing in response to ever present threats - they gain the competitive advantage and protect what matters most.

So what practical cybersecurity protection lessons can we take away from both the strengths and weaknesses of the Enigma operators?

1. Control Access Points: As discussed earlier, Enigma operators had a key sheet with which they adjusted their machine each day. Successful operation depended on both the sender and the receiver using the same settings. Modern day businesses can use two-factor authentication before allowing system access. That way, if one part is compromised, the whole system won’t break down.

2. Restrict to Essentials: Not all German personnel had access to the daily key sheets or settings, only the operators and their corresponding recipients. Insider threats continue to pose a significant risk—Verizon reports internal actors are linked to roughly 30–38% of breaches, and in some sectors, it’s even higher. Companies can enact role-based access and privileges, so employees only have access to information essential for their role.

3. Keep Credentials Current: Enigma operators rotated (or were supposed to rotate) keys and rotors daily. Businesses can refresh credentials, rotate encryption keys, and refresh API tokens on a regular basis to keep their system fresh - hackers are more likely to attack dormant systems and passwords.

4. Train Employees Adequately: Operator error and lapses in judgment ultimately led to the Enigma’s demise. Employees today should be trained on the importance of USB malware, phishing, weak passwords, and best practices regularly - along with frequent audits to ensure compliance and security protocols.

5. Document Your Defenses: Enigma operators had physical codebooks and paper trails. Modern day equivalents such as documented security policies, onboarding/offboarding logs, and incident reports can prove within court that reasonable measures were taken to protect the company and its system.

6. Assume Breach and Plan: At every turn, the Allies leveraged even the smallest pieces of captured information. Hackers do the same. You should always assume “when” rather than “if.” Companies can protect themselves by keeping an incident response guidebook, conducting frequent response exercises, and having a clear chain of command.

7. Layered Protection: The Enigma relied on multiple safeguards—plugboards, rotors, mirrors, lights, and key sheets—working together as a layered defense. Modern organizations use a similar approach: end-to-end encryption, NDAs, contracts, training, two-factor authentication, and accountability measures. These layers often make the difference between a secure system and a critical breakthrough.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) About Trade Secret Protection

Q1: What exactly qualifies as a trade secret?

A: Any confidential business information that provides economic value from not being known—formulas, processes, algorithms, designs, or customer data generally qualify as being protectable as a trade secret.

Q2: How do courts determine if information is a trade secret?

A: Courts look for “reasonable efforts” to keep it secret, including NDAs, access controls, and written policies.

Q3: Why is Enigma compared to trade secrets?

A: Both relied on secrecy for value. Once secrecy was lost, the advantage disappeared.

Q4: Can trade secrets last longer than patents?

A: Yes. Patents expire after 15 years (design patent) 20 years (utility patent), but trade secrets can last indefinitely—if secrecy is maintained. The formula for Coca-Cola is one of the most famous trade secrets. See our Patent Portfolio Management page for more information on what patents protect and how they differ from trade secrets.

Q5: What is the biggest risk to trade secrets today?

A: Insider threats and employee mistakes—often more than external hackers.

Q6: How can businesses avoid “operator errors” like those with Enigma?

A: Through employee training, strong policies, regular audits, and updated cybersecurity practices.

Q7: If someone steals my trade secret, what legal options do I have?

A: You can bring claims under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) or state versions of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA). You can also consider unfair competition claims and additional supporting claims. See our Intellectual Property Litigation page for a greater discussion of enforcement options.

Q8: What’s one quick step businesses can take today?

A: Conduct a trade secret audit—identify valuable information, confirm protection measures, and ensure employees know their obligations.