How was Lorenz different from Enigma?

Enigma was a hand-operated letter machine for tactical traffic. Lorenz was an automated teleprinter attachment that XORed a wheel-generated key stream onto 5-bit Baudot code, and carried strategic high-command messages.

The first programmable electronic digital computer, built at Bletchley Park specifically to speed up the statistical attack on Lorenz wheel settings.

Was Typex ever broken?

No. Typex used five rotors and avoided several Enigma weaknesses, and there is no evidence German cryptanalysts read its traffic.

Lorenz / Typex Decoder

Simulate the Lorenz and Typex teleprinter ciphers used alongside Enigma.

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The lorenz-typex-decoder decoder is on the roadmap. The heavier binary and cryptographic parsers ship after the core text and token decoders — all of which are already live and working.

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What is the Lorenz / Typex Decoder?

The Lorenz SZ40/42 was a German teleprinter cipher machine that XORed each 5-bit Baudot character with a pseudo-random stream from twelve wheels, while Typex was the British rotor machine derived from commercial Enigma.

Lorenz — codenamed Tunny at Bletchley Park — worked on 5-bit Baudot teleprinter code rather than letters on a keyboard. Twelve wheels generated a key stream that was XORed with the plaintext bits, and because XOR is self-inverse, the same machine and settings decoded it. It carried strategic traffic between the German high command, one level above Enigma's tactical role.

Breaking Tunny drove the construction of Colossus, the first programmable electronic digital computer, after a German operator retransmitted a message with the same key and gave the codebreakers a depth. Typex, meanwhile, was Britain's own rotor machine — an Enigma derivative with five rotors and no reciprocal-plugboard weakness, and it was never broken.