Man Pleads Guilty to Stealing Enigma Machine

Adler writes: "A man has pleaded guilty to to 'handling' the stolen Enigma machine in the UK. Its a short piece, but says that some vital parts of the machine are still missing. A longer BBC News piece is here." You may remember when this was first stolen, then held for ransom, then recovered -- this is the mopping up part.

Comments

Colossus

[chris_sawtell]

Cracking the Enigma, and more importantly the Fish codes later on was made possible by some completely original thinking by Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers, who together created Colossus, the first ever electronic computer. ENIAC eat thy dust.

Re:Colossus

[kd5biv]

Cracking the Enigma, and more importantly the Fish codes later on was made possible by some completely original thinking by Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers, who together created Colossus, the first ever electronic computer. ENIAC eat thy dust.

But the previous poster is right .. Polish intelligence was using a device called the "Bombe" to automate (to some extent) cracking a 3-wheel Enigma. Turing actually expanded on that design as a first step to cracking the 4-wheel machine, which was an order of magnitude more complicated, and later developed the Colossus as a more sophisticated approach to the same problem, but both were highly specialized machines and not as general-purpose as ENIAC .. although it *can* be argued that ENIAC wasn't exactly "general purpose" ..

Now, if you want to talk about mechanical computers, what I *really* would like to see, if it's even possible, is a working model of Babbage's Analytical Engine. ;-) Probably not possible, since very few of his drawings survived, but it would still be fascinating to see that machine run .. bit offtopic, I'll agree, but thought I'd indulge ..

Re:Colossus

[choco]

Oh Dear! I don't really know where to start putting the facts right here.

>Polish intelligence was using a device called the "Bombe" to automate (to some extent) cracking a 3-wheel Enigma.

Polish intelligence knew about Enigma and smuggled a copied machine to the British. Subsequently the British managed to get hold of some genuine machines. This is how they started their attempts to crack the code. The detailed wiring of the rotas was a very important factor.

Initially the British intelligences used a a variety of manual methods to break Enigma. mostly based on squared paper and paper strips. These were based on the weakness that a letter would never be encoded as itself - they also took advantage of some sloppy operating procedures by the German encryption clerks.

Latter the British built Bombes to routinely crack enigma.

Colosus was not invented to crack Enigma - but was built to crack a different system of encryption - the one used by the German High command.

Those wanting to know more should read "The Ultra Secret" - which gives a history of what went on at Bletchly park from a historical POV - with limited details about how the code was cracked - but a lot of information about what was obtained and how it was used.

-------------

My facts come from :

1) Bletchly Park is 30 miles north of here and the exhibition there is very informative.

2) My aunt was one of the WRENS who maintained and operated the Bombes at Bletchly Park during WW2. It annoyed by Grandfather until his dying day that my Aunt always refused to discuss anything at all about what she did during the war.She only told the rest of the family when "The Ultra Secret" was published.

Re:the missing rotors

[Rogerborg]

• I know it's not the same as the entire recovered machine that was captured and used to defeat the natzi germany forces

Lest we rewrite history even more, Poland cracked Enigma and gave a working machine (built from scratch) to the UK well before an actual German machine was recovered. The recovered machine just confirmed how amazingly accurate the Polish device was.

Re: Background, please

[none2222]

The BBC article was kinda light on details . . . care to give more in-depth info about the Enigma Machine?

Certainly.

The Engima story is quite interesting and complex; volumes can and have been written about it and it's beyond the scope of a Slashdot post to relay the full history. But I've provided some links if you're curious.

It should be noted that Bletchley Park's work in deciphering the Enigma codes - used by the Germans to direct operations including U-boat attacks on Allied convoys - proved vital to the outcome of the WWII.

Bletchley Park, code-named Station X, employed teams of mathematicians, linguists and chess champions during the war.

By the end of 1945, 10,000 people worked there.

With the help of decoding machines, the army of experts were able to crack the German code Enigma, which Berlin believed to be unbreakable.

The work carried out at the top-secret centre is believed to have shortened the war by several years and was kept secret until 1967.

The stolen device, an Abwehr Enigma G312, is a rare four-rotor version, one of only three still known to be in existence.

Re:Turing would be turning in his grave ...

[heliocentric]

As the US government now demands that a backdoor be put into this World War II relic ... it WAS considered 'strong' encryption in World War II anyway ...

But how strong? Wasn't the enigma made for banking communications and then adobted by the military? Everyone knew back when the banks used it that there was the flaw that pressing a letter on the keypad would never result in that same letter being in that same place in the cypher text, but I don't thinks it a major leap of faith to assume the banking industry didn't expect several governments would work hard to attempt to foil the scheme...

And furthermore, Turing didn't make the machine, or even have any impact on the design - turing was in the position the US gov is - trying to break down the ecryption. If you went up to Turing at a point when he was deeply stuck on something and asked his feelings about having a known backdoor, what would he say?

(note: I do not support the US gov in the area of wanting backdoors, but I don't think unresearhed complaints against it is appropriate either)

Several downloadable Enigma simulations...

[Robber Baron]

There are links to many downloadable simulations here, including an Abwehr Enigma sim for Windows. There even appears to be one written for Palm Pilot.

Headline incorrect

[dstone]

Puhleeez, Slashdot, dramatic headlines are great, but when they come at the expense of truth, it gets to be a drag.

Your headline reads: Man Pleads Guilty to Stealing Enigma Machine

The story itself states clearly several times in the first few sentences: that he "admitted handling stolen goods" and that he "pleaded guilty ... to handling a stolen Enigma encoding machine". That's quite a bit different than admitting he stole them. It may well be a crime to handle stolen goods after the fact, and there's possibly a good story here also. But this guy didn't plead guilty to stealing it so the more interesting story of how/why it was stolen and by whom is still out there. Consider saving this headline for a later day...

Re:On a related note

[MSBob]

BS. Poles had the Enigma deciphered well before it even got into Briton's hands. The Brits were the ones who broke the second, improved Enigma's code but the very first Enigma was cracked by Poles. Swallow the truth.

Re:bad pun

[freq]

hey retard turing would have loved a backdoor in it.

iirc turing was killed because he was a homosexual. he was arrested and had his security clearance revoked. then someone poisoned him with cyanide. its very sad.

anyway if you care check out the alan turing homepage