Do-It-Yourself Electronic Enigma Machine

Radio Shack Robot writes "The Enigma-E is a DIY Building Kit that enables you to build your own electronic variant of the famous Enigma coding machine that was used by the German army during WWII. It works just like a real Enigma and is compatible with an M3 and M4 Enigma as well as the standard Service Machines. A message encrypted on, say, a real Enigma M4 can be read on the Enigma-E and vice versa."

Comments

What's the point?

[PacoTaco]

If you're not going to do the real thing, why not just make a software replica?

Re:What's the point?

[The Snowman]

If you're not going to do the real thing, why not just make a software replica?

What kind of geek are you? Don't you find it cool to have tons of useless hardware laying around???

Re:What's the point?

[Nakito]

why not just make a software replica?

Maybe for the same reason that it's more fun to fly an airplane than to fly MS Flight Simulator, even if you're not flying an F-16. Simulations are nice, but sometimes you just want to get away from your computer and play with tangible things. And just because it's not the historical Enigma doesn't mean it's not cool in its own right.

Re:What's the point?

[mm0mm]

If you're not going to do the real thing, why not just make a software replica?

1. just preference
2. educational purposes
3. more tangible interface than multi-tasking keyboard/mouse + monitor
4. hobbyist mentality
5. nostalgia to pre-PC era

there are ways to achieve the same result, and obviously some people prefer harder and more time-consuming way. Also for some people writing code may take more time than building a DIY kit. some people prefer to drive 67 mustang than 03 accord or mercedes. others ride a bicycle.

Re:What's the point?

[eclectro]

Steve Ciarcia of Circuit Cellar fame once said "Soldering iron is my favorite computer language."

Well, it's mine too. For those who don't know who Steve is, there was this magazine on the newstands that was really cool to read and it was called "Byte". Steve ranked up there with the Woz for hardware crafting.

I remember back in the day when you would go to the store and it was the only computer magazine there.

If you like crafting hardware, you can have a lot of fun by finding a library (most likely university) that has the back issues shelved somewhere.

Yes, I'm older than most of you here.

Re:What's the point?

[MobyTurbo]

I recall reading that the original Unix crypt(3) algorithm was based on the Enigma machine. It was picked specifically because it was already broken, so that the NSA wouldn't complain. Nowadays POSIX (and Linux) crypt(3) uses DES to encrypt, though there are known ways to break crypt's implementation of DES too. (Thus one should enable shadow password files. :-) )

Re:What's the point?

[TygerFish]

If you're not going ot do the real thing, why not just make a software replica?

That's a brilliantly simple, brilliantly clear Idea!

Of course, some of the fun must be a matter of having and assembling some kind of hardware, because when you get to the root of the matter, what you would get with the electronic kit, a software emulation, (or, for that matter, the original machine) would be the ability to generate one of serveral codes that have been cracked for about twice the time that most slashdot readers have been alive.

Re:What's the point?

[beaverfever]

I remember back in the day when you would go to the store and it was the only computer magazine there. ...and we'd have to walk 40 miles in the rain, up hill, to get to the store, and when we got there, magazines were only a nickel, but we'd have to save for a month just to get that nickel. Anyways, we'd get home with our magazines and read them by the light of an oil lamp, and we were happy!

Oh those computers, they were as big as a barn, and every time we booted them we'd have to punch in every line of *bonk!*

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why make it? Because it's not there, yet!

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck.

Re:What's the point?

[treat]

I recall reading that the original Unix crypt(3) algorithm was based on the Enigma machine.

Your wrongness is astounding. The fact that you were moderated up to 4 is proof that the moderation system has finally failed. I'll never read the comments on slashdot again. But I will fix this final error.

crypt(1), the file 'encryption' utility is based on a simplified Enigma. crypt(3), the password hash with an 8 character limit that can be run 100,000 times a second on a modern machine, always used DES. Modern Unixes use an md5 or blowfish based hash that doesn't have an arbitrary length limit and is designed to be much slower. (and has variable round count and a larger salt space).

Re:What's the point?

[Henry V .009]

I did that in high school. It's pretty easy.

Re:What's the point?

[Erratio]

Yeah...I'd definitely consider flying planes and playing with old encryption techniques on the same level.
It's cool in its own right (which for me is mostly just novelty) but it's also not cool in a lot of others. I'd personally prefer to spend my time away from my computer playing with tangible things that aren't just basically old computers.

Re:What's the point?

[Richard_L_James]

What kind of geek are you? Don't you find it cool to have tons of useless hardware laying around???

Hey! Real geeks find it cool to have useless software and useless hardware lying around!!! Anyway I'm off to play The Grinch on my dreamcast... ;-)

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your wrongness is astounding.

Actually, his wrongness was very subtle. First of all, he may very well have read somewhere that crypt(3) was based on enigma. That is all he claimed, isn't it? (I guess careful reading of posts isn't required on SlashDot either, not even by people who are anal about accuracy.)

Still, he did manage to pick out something called "crypt" as having been based on Enigma. My guess is that he uses Linux. His Linux distro probably no longer comes with a crypt utility (I ran into a problem with this recently and had to use this instead). Having no crypt utility, and thus no man page for a crypt utility, it's hard to remember that the crypt utility used to be crypt(1). Perhaps he just assumed that some code which was once a separate program called crypt has since been library-ized, keeping the same man page location?

Re:What's the point?

[MobyTurbo]

I recall reading that the original Unix crypt(3) algorithm was based on the Enigma machine.

Your wrongness is astounding. The fact that you were moderated up to 4 is proof that the moderation system has finally failed. I'll never read the comments on slashdot again. But I will fix this final error.

crypt(1), the file 'encryption' utility is based on a simplified Enigma. crypt(3), the password hash with an 8 character limit that can be run 100,000 times a second on a modern machine, always used DES.

My apologies for any mistakes I may have made. I seem to recall it was an interview concerning the implementation of very early (pre-V6, etc.) Unix; but maybe they were talking about crypt(1), unfortunately the interview did not really specify whether it was the library function or the command; hence my error. Incidentally the distro I use does not include crypt(1), so I had little way of knowing there was a crypt command via my machine's man pages, though considering how insecure it is compared to modern encryption tools such as gpg the crypt(1) you describe is not neccesasary making it's omission understandable. In any event, I hope you stick around anyway; we need more Unix gurus on Slashdot. :-)

Re:What's the point?

[Nakito]

Your wrongness is astounding. . . . I'll never read the comments on slashdot again."

The comments on Slashdot are a kind of peer review system. Errors are often quickly pointed out, opinions are rebutted, and we all meander slowly toward better knowledge. That's what I like about it. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

God bless the Reiser4 file system, and with it the ability to add plugins for security (like automagic file encryption with your algorithm of choice). God bless too, the people who published the code to loki91, idea, gost, blowfish, 3-way, RC5, A5, SEAL and skipja^M^M^M^M ummm no not skipjack, we don't have the code to skipjack!

Thank God I'm posting as Anonym... HEY! Who are you? Carnivore? WHERE ARE YOU TAKING MY COMPUTER? Hey! You're hurting my arm sir! YOU'RE HURTING MY ARM SIR! ......helllpp mmeeeeee!

Re:What's the point?

[BitterOak]

Maybe for the same reason that it's more fun to fly an airplane than to fly MS Flight Simulator, even if you're not flying an F-16.

Ah, but there's an important difference. A flight simulator is not functionally equivalent to flying a plane. Flying a plane can get you from A to B much quicker than driving. It is a form of transportation. A flight simulator will get you nowhere.

A software enigma however is functionally equivalent to the real thing. Both can encrypt and decrypt the same messages. One runs in a computer, the other on mechanical systems.

A better analogy that yours would thus be flying a conventional plane with mechanical linkages from the flight controls to flight surfaces, and flying a newer plane with "fly-by-wire" systems where an intervening computer reads the control positions and controls the flight surfaces for you.

Re:What's the point?

[Deraj DeZine]

Let's see, here:

Original, inane comment: +4 (not even overrated).
Factual reply: +2.
Commenting on how moderation works: +3.

Re:What's the point?

[barakn]

You forgot one thing. It was uphill both ways, to the store and back home.

Re:What's the point?

[coyotedata]

The real thing has been on the market for years. The Brits and no one else ever broke a German code-they always had a source book or a German giving out too much info

Re:What's the point?

[b00fhead]

You were looky!

Re:What's the point?

[UnassumingLocalGuy]

Watchoo talkin bout.


Original, inane comment: +4 (not even overrated).
Factual reply: +2.
Commenting on how moderation works: Priceless.

Re:What's the point?

[op00to]

You liar! C'mon, we were really hoping you'd leave for good this time.

Original Messages

[The Snowman]

I wonder if there is anywhere to get original Nazi Enigma messages to decode.

Re:Original Messages

[Anonymous Coward]

Try here.

Re:Original Messages

[Penguinshit]

Here you go..

Decode this.

Re:Original Messages

[garbagedisposal]

"I wonder if there is anywhere to get original Nazi Enigma messages to decode."

Yes but where can I get some original Nazi's to send them to?

Re:Original Messages

[chrome]

I don't know why that was marked as troll. I decoded it. Was funny!

Oh well, some people have no sense of humour :(

Re:Original Messages

[orthogonal]

Yes but where can I get some original Nazi's to send them to?

Well, the flippant answer is Argentina (Or Brazil).

On a more serious note, you might try Latvia; in 1998 about 500 Latvians, former members of the Waffen-SS marched through Riga to celebrate the 55th anniversary of the SS.

Up until 1996, you could have looked in Indiana in the United States:

Kazys Ciurinskas, a former member of the Lithuanian SS division accused of killing Russian and Lithuanian Jews and POWs, lived in Indiana since the end of the war. Ciurinskas collected a $540 monthly pension from the German government since 1960 while living in the US and being a US citizen. In a 1995-97 United States of America v. Kazys Ciurinskas case the US District Court in Indiana stripped Ciurinskas of US citizenship.

Interestingly, the amount of the pension paid to these former SS by the German government varies based on their final rank in the SS -- higher ranks get a bigger pension. Only recently -- and only after international pressure -- did the German government modify its pension law to strip the pension from war criminals, and even so, there is no requirement that any investigation be made of recipients, nor is there any mechanism to do so, so even known war criminals can continue to collect payments from the German government.

Ironically, some war criminals even receive, in addition to their normal pensions what are called "victim's" pensions -- including those believed to have massacred American soldiers. The following was written in 1997, and thus may be slightly out of date:

The well-respected German military historian Gerhard Schreiber estimates the number of war criminals receiving these extra payments from the German government at 50,000. Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden, from Ochtendung near Koblenz, is one of the "victims." According to a German federal court, Lehnigk-Emden killed 15 unarmed women and children in Caiazzo near Naples in Italy in October 1943. Because Lehnigk-Emden was later injured (shot in the leg) while trying to escape from an allied POW camp and suffers a mild handicap, he receives an additional "victim" pension.

Another current recipient of victim pensions is the former SS Hauptsturm-fuhrer Wilhelm Mohnke. Mohnke, who was a close confidant of Adolf Hitler and commandant of the "Fuhrerbunker" in Berlin during Hitler's last days. According to the US Department of Justice "there is very substantial evidence pointing to Wilhelm Mohnke's personal involvement in the perpetration of Nazi war crimes" -- for his role in the massacre of 72 American POWs in 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge.

At the same time that Germany provides monthly pension payments to former members of the SS and war criminals, persons forced to be slave laborers for the Nazi regime get far less:

[U]nder an agreement... brokered by the U.S. and German governments, however, survivors of slave labor under the Nazis will be awarded only $790 each for back pay and a lump sum of $7,894 each in recognition of the 55-year delay. Those who were exploited as "forced labor," such as Nazi prisoners working in agriculture, will get a mere $5,000 each.

So, frankly, any Old Folks (Pensioner's) Home in Germany should provide you with plenty of "original Nazis", living comfortably thanks to the largess of the current German government, while their victims -- those who survived at all, those who haven't died while waiting for their reparations -- continue to suffer.

(Of course, I will now be modded down as an anti-German racist, becaus

Re:Original Messages

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but where can I get some original Nazi's to send them to?

Try here.

Re:Original Messages

[FFFish]

Of course, I will now be modded down as an anti-German racist

Well, no. You should be modded down as an anti-soldier bigot.

There's a very good chance that your country has soldiers engaged in a military action that others see as warfare against an ethnic group. Presumably those soldier continue their action because they have promised on their honour to uphold their country's decisions.

Should the US soldier in Iraq be shunned for participating in an illegal war? Should the Israeli soldier dropping bombs on Palestinian houses be scapegoated for killing civilians?

Well, yes, probably they should: the world would be a lot better if every common person were to just act decently toward every other human being.

But we don't: they are soldiers who committed to doing what they are being told by our own elected governments to do, and out of respect for that commitment we promise to look after them for life.

Well, okay, maybe not for life, as some of our countries seem a little too eager to cut back veteran's pay and healthcare and long-term group home care. But for most of their life. An admittedly short life given that some of our countries seem a little too reluctant to supply airworthy helicopters or bulletproof vests.

Come to think of it, maybe our own nations are anti-soldier bigots. How ironic...

Re:Original Messages

[orthogonal]

Well, no. You should be modded down as an anti-soldier bigot.

There's a very good chance that your country has soldiers engaged in a military action that others see as warfare against an ethnic group. Presumably those soldier continue their action because they have promised on their honour to uphold their country's decisions.

What a specious argument -- while I disagree with the war in Iraq, I can tell the difference between that and Hitler's invasion of Poland (and then France, and Russia, and.... ). Anyone who claims there's a general moral equivalency between American soldiers and Nazi war criminals has either decided to jettison decency in order to make a point, or simply has no real grasp of the historical realities -- or is a despicable troll.

Son, if you can't distinguish between American soldiers defending their country and Nazi members of the SS invading Germany's neighbors, if you can't tell the difference between decent soldiers and war criminals, then no amount of argument on my part is going to make you see the light.

I don't begrudge Germany's common soldiers getting a small pension, even if their service was in Nazi aggression. Yes, some of the Waffen-SS were "common" battlefield Soldaten -- but some were war criminals.

But I have to ask why slave laborers get no more that about $7000 total, when some former SS get that much in a year.

And I have to draw the line at war criminals. Germany giving pensions to Nazi war criminals is just a slap in the face to Germany's victims and to all Americans who sacrificed to bring an end to Hitler's Reich -- it's those American soldiers I'm standing up for.

I don't think those American veterans would call me a bigot for thinking they're not the moral equivalent of Nazi war criminals.

I won't ask that you apologize to me, but I do ask that you apologize to the American soldiers you've compared to Nazis.

Re:Original Messages

[Anonymous Coward]

And I have to draw the line at war criminals. Germany giving pensions to Nazi war criminals is just a slap in the face to Germany's victims and to all Americans who sacrificed to bring an end to Hitler's Reich -- it's those American soldiers I'm standing up for.

What about the allied soldiers from other countries?

Poster also did not compare American soldiers to Nazis; he just pointed out that soldiers are paid to follow orders, and that we can't necessarily begrudge them for following stupid orders. Although I would draw the line at war criminals -- there's no excuse for that.

Re:Original Messages

[orthogonal]

What about the allied soldiers from other countries?

Yeah, honestly I considered substituing "Allies" for Americans, but I was worried that

1) as an American I should speak only for Americans, and

2) Allied soldiers in World War II included the Soviets, and the Soviets did commit war crimes -- most notably, the Katyn Forrest massacre of 11,000 Polish officers (which was for a long time blamed on the Nazis) and lots of brutal rapes and murders of German civilians at the end of, and immediately after, the war.

So as to not muddy the message, I just wrote about "American soldiers". But I do not mean to minimize the sacrifices of our Allies -- indeed, had it not been for the stalwart British as led by Mr. Churchill, America might never have been able to take the war to the German homeland.

Poster also did not compare American soldiers to Nazis; he just pointed out that soldiers are paid to follow orders....

He (FFFish (7567)) explicitly said "There's a very good chance that your country has soldiers engaged in a military action that others see as warfare against an ethnic group. Presumably those soldier continue their action because they have promised on their honour to uphold their country's decisions.

What that ignores is that fighting against enemies predominantly of one ethnic group, as for example, America fighting against Italy in WWII, is very different than targeting one ethnic group, as the Nazis did with the Jews, the Slavs, and the Roma ("Gypsies").

The two are not at all morally equivalent, and it's pure sophistry to conflate Nazi-style genocide and "normal" warfare as practice by America.

And before anyone objects, yes, there were some war crimes committed by Americans, and yes, there were some "good Germans" who avoided or actively opposed Nazi criminality. The difference is one of policy and intent: U.S. soldiers aren't trying to commit genocide; the Nazi Einsatzgruppen were trying and succeeding at genocide. And that's why FFFish (7567)'s comment is so objectionable: because it sees no difference between these two very different kinds of soldiers.

Re:Original Messages

[Richard_L_James]

Here you go.. Decode this.

[Please wait decoding...]

What the %^!... amazing... truely amazing... so the German's even got there first with mobile picture messaging in 1923!!! Clever Germans! :)

Re:Original Messages

[CaptJay]

Maybe offtopic, but such discussion is bound to happen on anything related to WWII.

I would only like to respectfully point out a few things. It doesn't say what I think as clearly as I would like, but bear with me.

1) The definition of a war crime varies widely from person to person. If we are talking about deliberate attacks/massacres on civilians, then I am certain you could dig up quite a few American (and other Allies) veterans who fall in that category and still have their pensions. Have you read about Dresden? The allies planned their bombings on the surrounding cities and left Dresden intact so the refugees would all be packed there. And then dropped one of the deadliest bombings in WWII on their heads. We're talking bombing a city packed with refugees, with no military value, to kill over 30,000 people in a day.

2) Never forget that the "justice" of war is always that of the victorious side, and therefore, in my opinion, it is no justice at all. When the defeated party kills thousands of civilians, it's a war crime. When the victor does just about the same, well, it sucks, but it was war.

Quote from the first link up in google for Dresden World War bombing):

[British Chief Marshal Sir Arthur] Harris, however, remained unrepentant, commenting on Churchill's objection that he did not regard 'the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier'. Even so, Dresden remains the prime example cited by those who condemn the morality of 'city busting' as practised by the Anglo-US bombing forces and was still a matter of contention in 1992 when a statue of Harris was unveiled in London."

Was there a tribunal to investigate possible war crimes by Allied troups in WWII? Of course not: they won. Therefore, we necessarily know more about horrible acts commited by the defeated party than we do for the winning one.

I'm not defending Nazi Germany policies of mass exterminations. They are a clear example of humanity gone wrong. But while they are not on the same scale as other examples, they are not the only example of humans gone wrong. And that is my point: nothing is absolute when it comes to human nature.

Have you ever visited Germany, or walked grounds ravaged by war? Seen the legacy of damage done by both sides? Visited Dresden? The concentration camps sites? Talked with people who were there when the bombs fell and survived? I did. And I found there even more truth in a saying some here would recognize : "Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth."

Re:Original Messages

[cygnus]

crap, i modded you down as overrated when i meant to mod you UP as underrated. posting to this thread to undo my faulty moderations (i can imagine i'm going to get modded down for this, but i was just trying to do the "right thing.")

Re:Original Messages

[Anonymous Coward]

What do they have to do with the Green Party, anyhow?

Or were all those trollish (?) rumours of eco-Nazis true!?

Re:Original Messages

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea why you are modded up as you clearly lack any knowledge of history. The Schutzstaffel (SS) was not the same thing as the standard German army (Wehrmacht). The German army would come through and take an area per standard military procedures and then the SS would come in, round up anybody that caused trouble - Jews, Poles, Homosexuals - and shipped them off to labor/death camps.

There's a difference between a soldier and a monster carrying out state-genocide.

Re:Original Messages

[Elektroschock]

Waffen SS was the expanded military organisation of the SS. Also regular soldiers and foreigners (as Lituavia) served in this group. It was a kind of elite corps compared to Wehrmacht with harder policy.

/*At the same time that Germany provides monthly pension payments to former members of the SS and war criminals, persons forced to be slave laborers for the Nazi regime get far less:*/

A soldier is also a slave laborer :-)

This comparison is wrong. No German government today (and esp. not the current Social democrats who went into Concentration Camps) is in favour of nazi methods or members of nazi groups. compare with other European states. Don't forget that in London the Queen even erected a memorial for a war criminal. And what about American war crimes? The German view towards this issue is quite more serious.

You mix up different issues. When you commit a crime this is not related to your pension because of injury in service. They don't get this pension because of war crimes or the participation in an organisation but because of the injury.

Germany also pays pensions for east German communist Stasi servicemen. Your posting was riding on anti-German sentiment.

Blame the problems for 'slave workers' on the allied forces that didn't make a rule for some forced labour workers in the post-war time. Reparations on individuals were indeed quite uncommon in these days, nobody thought of. In the late 90th some US lawyers successfully bang the drum and put pressure on the German goverment by using the crappy US legal system and a moral case media campaign. Cui bono? Probably not the 'slave workers' but the lawyers themselves.

Re:Original Messages

[orthogonal]

I was going to call a close to this contentious thread, until I say the parent post, which blames the treatment of slave laborers on the Allies:

Blame the problems for 'slave workers' on the allied forces that didn't make a rule

Holy Christ. How about we blame problems for slave laborers (and I'll dispense with your disbelieving quote marks) on the fucking Nazis who enslaved them???

No, you want to blame the Allies???

Don't forget that in London the Queen even erected a memorial for a war criminal. And what about American war crimes? The German view towards this issue is quite more serious.

The Germans managed to kill nearly 11 million Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, homosexuals, and whomever else they didn't like, and you're complaining about -- implying it's comparable to -- Air Marshall Arthur "Bomber" Harris's Dresden raid. Honest men can debate the justifications (or not) of Dresden, as they can the morality of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on civilian London. But neither rises to the stain on humanity that Auschwitz does -- except in the minds of Germans eager to claim that everybody is equally guilty.

As to American war crimes, I'm sure there were scattered American war crimes -- but again, there were no smokestacks, no ovens, no cattle cars filled to bursting with entire german families "evacuated" to the East for slave labor and mass murder. Instead we brought Germany the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift.

Waffen SS was the expanded military organisation of the SS. Also regular soldiers and foreigners (as Lituavia) served in this group. It was a kind of elite corps compared to Wehrmacht with harder policy.

I take this as an implication (as others have posted explicitly) that the Waffen-SS -- and the Wehrmacht in general -- were "common" soldiers, and not war criminals like the Sonnderkommando and the Einsatzgruppen. Sadly, this is not entirely true.

In fact, especially in the East, as this order, later cataloged as Nuremberg Document D-411, by General Walter von Reichenau, then Commander in Chief of the German 6th Army, makes clear:

[...] Thus, the armed forces are facing tasks that do not belong to the domain of the usual tasks of the military. A serviceman on the eastern territories is not just a soldier, fighting by the rules of combat, but the carrier of the national idea and an avenger for all the calamities inflicted upon the Germans and peoples related to them.

That is why a soldier should be deeply aware of the necessity of the stern but justified punishment of the Jews. Another goal is to nip in the bud rebellions in the rear of the German Armed Forces. These rebellions are always inspired, as our experience shows, by the Jews.

A Wehrmacht armament inspector, in his report to the Wehrmacht High Command (the OKW or Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) notes the consequence of the "common" soldiers' complicity in genocide (Nuremberg Document PS-3257, emphasis orthogonal's):

From the outset the attitude of the Jewish population was anxious-willing. They tried to avoid anything that might displease the German Administration. That they hated the German Administration and the Army in their hearts is obvious and not surprising. However, there is no evidence that the Jews, either as a body, or even in any considerable numbers, have taken part in sabotage, etc. Without doubt there have been some terrorists or saboteurs among them, just as there have been among the Ukrainians. But

it cannot be claimed that the Jews as such present any kind of danger for the German Wehrmacht. The troops and the German Administration have been satisfied with the work output of the Jews, who are of course motivated by no emotion except fear.

Immediately following the military operations, the Jewish population remained undisturbed at first. It was

Re:Original Messages

[calidoscope]

The definition of a war crime varies widely from person to person.

And then some...

How much of a role does intent have in determining whether an action constituted a war crime? Or is it results?

WRT Dresden, one book indicated that the death toll was more like 130,000+ and also stated that there was no military purpose. If you look at the timing, te decision to destroy Dresden may have retaliation for the Battle of the Bulge.

WRT civilian deaths, the largest war related civilian death toll is the Influenze pandemic of 1918-1920 - somewhere between 50 to 100 million. The difference was the death toll was unintentional.

Re:Original Messages

[bezuwork's friend]

Son, if you can't distinguish between American soldiers defending their country and Nazi members of the SS invading Germany's neighbors, if you can't tell the difference between decent soldiers and war criminals, then no amount of argument on my part is going to make you see the light.

Please. While I expect that we are comporting ourselves pretty well in Iraq (we have to, what with the world watching), we haven't always done so. My Lai comes to mind, for one.

And we are not there in Iraq to defend America, no matter what the official propaganda is. We bombed Iraq to hell in the first Gulf war. They had no WMD, or so it seems. Even if they had some, how could they have really threatened the US? Israel, sure, but not the US. Had they managed to get one to the US, we would've rolled over them in nothing flat (as we did), but at least then there would have been a valid reason. As it is, it seems pretty convincing it was simply a reason to convert taxpayer money to Haliburton, et al.'s income.

I'm getting off topic here, but I'm sorry, I'm sick of the government meddling in the affairs of other countries (WIPO, TRIPS, Iraq, et al.) in ways that get many foreigners very upset but it is ok because we say so in our paternalistic way. It is all about the money - ours. Yet we can't take care of our own. For example, even on subfreezing days, you can find homeless on the street within two blocks of the white house.

Re:Original Messages

[be-fan]

Great post!

Re:Original Messages

[be-fan]

I think the point is not so much that there is an equivilency between what the US did in Iraq and what Germany did so much as there is a similarity. In both cases, soldiers were not fighting to protect their country, but to invade a foreign one. In both cases, they killed civilians in the process.

And apologizing for the comparison would be asinine. When someone compares to things it does not mean they are identical. It means that they share some characteristics. Unless the set of attributes of American soldiers is completely disjoint from the set of attributes of Nazi soldiers, then there *are* valid comparisons to be made between the two.

Re:Original Messages

[Anonymous Coward]

Try president@whitehouse.gov.

Re:Original Messages

[Anonymous Coward]

The Schutzstaffel (SS) was not the same thing as the standard German army (Wehrmacht).

Arguably, the German army was less brutal than the SS, but they committed their fair share of atrocities (ordered by German *army* Generals, not S.S.)... just ask the Russians, who were regarded as sub-human and slaughtered by the ARMY in huge numbers.

Re:Original Messages

[flatface]

link for the lazy

Re:Original Messages

[McSnarf]

Air Marshall Arthur "Bomber" Harris's Dresden raid.
Without doubt a serious war crime. Also no doubt that there were war crimes (and non-war genocide) from the German side.
But - Harris' "noble deed" did not help to shorten the war, but killed loads of innocent Germans. (Yes, there were innocent Germans, too.)

There is no tit-for-tat in crime.

The Germans managed to kill nearly 11 million Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, homosexuals, and whomever else they didn't like
According to Rummel, it was 21 million... Stalin killed double that, Mao about 38 million. Read about this here.

Still - all of them are criminals.
There is no tit-for-tat in crime.

Need I mention slavery, killings of native indians, crimes of war ?

Responsibility is inheritable.
Guilt is not.

Re:Original Messages

[krautmann]

Being a German, I would like to elaborate on this.

First of all, pension systems do not take criminal activity in account. A person
might commit most heineous crimes and serve a life sentence. However, if s/he
has acquired pension payment benefit rights, s/he will keep them. It's property,
and you just cannot take it away. Even if it is most offending to see a murderer
receive monthly payments while some victims will see nothing. That's how pension
systems work.

The pension system for ex army and Waffen SS members we have now dates back to
the fifties. It was part of a political deal. Germans were needed in the Cold War.
The young democratic republic could need anything but opposition from former members
of the armed forces, who counted by the millions. So prosecution of war
crimes ceased in the beginning of the
fifties (never totally, though). Jewish organisations received
"compensation" (I know one cannot compensate mass murder). That was possible
because the public coffers were full. Other victims were mostly
behind the Iron Curtain. Nobody wanted to be remembered of the sordid past.
This includes the Allies because they were busy with the Cold War, and, a fact
which is nowadays mostly forgotten, the rule most in command played 33-45 was much less
splendid than depicted nowadays.

However, the hope of ex Nazis that there will never be any prosecution never
materialized. It re-started in 59 and goes on till then. But all participants
are really old now. No smart SS officers but octogenarians limping
along. Although today's judges are not no longer biased in favour of Nazi criminals
(that was not the case in, for example, 1970), it is really hard to find the
truth about events which took place 60 years back.
The ex Nazi problem will thus very soon cease to exist. Just do some calculations.
Hitler came to power in 1933. At that time, age of consent was 21. So the youngest
person who is still alive and might have voted for him was born in 1912 and is 92.
Then, to be in command in 33-45 a soldier was to be in his twenties. Having been 20 in
'45 means being 84 now. Higher ranks were in their thirties or forties, usually.
Which means they must be a hundred years old or more.

20-30 years ago, the generation which took part in 33-45 went into retirement. A few
years later, the so-called flak generation: those who were drafted 43-45 at the age
of 15-16 for flak duty. That's my father's generation. Even these guys are gradually passing
away now.

Thus, you will find very few oldtimers in German pensioneer's homes who receive pensions
as Waffen SS members. Not because justice has been done, but because they are almost
all dead now. That's what our government is hoping for: when offenders die
of old age, their victims will pass away, too.

Re:Original Messages

[orthogonal]

Being a German, I would like to elaborate on this.

Cogently, informatively, and dispassionately -- without any special pleading -- put. Thank you.

Re:Original Messages

[hughk]

That's what our government is hoping for: when offenders die of old age, their victims will pass away, too.

Interesting quote. A friend's Jewish Father received compensation for the Apotheke that he was forced to flee from in Germany in the thirties. The compensation arrived in 1985 or so, the day after he died. This was after some twenty years of bureacratic prevarication.

Re:Original Messages

[AlecC]

Of course, I will now be modded down as an anti-German racist

Well, no. You should be modded down as an anti-soldier bigot.

That is to assume that the SS qualify as soldiers. Grandparent made no suggestion about the German Army, Navy and Airforce, who were fighting for their country in a war not of their personal making. The SDS, however, were Hitlers personal bully buys. They explicitly had a chain of command that did not pass through the normal military command. While they were sometimes used in positions alongside regular soldiers, they were also used where the regular army would have refused.

It is not reasonable to equate the SS with regular soldiers, either of 1945 Germany or 2004 America.

Here's my Electronic Enigma Machine

[OverlordQ]

Here's my Electronic Enigma Machine.

Re:Here's my Electronic Enigma Machine

[Ragica]

Python, infinitely useful "out of the box", has come bundled with a module called "rotor" which is basically an enigma-like scrambler. You can add as many rotors as you like to your digital enigma-like machine.

Sadly this module has been marked for deprecation in python 2.3, though it is still there. I found the module very useful for some things --- a simple, light weight encryption can be a handy thing. Everyone knows that it is weak encryption these days though... but still useful, in my opinion.

Electronic Version? Why not just use software

[pajor]

Who would want an electronic version of the Enigma machine? You could just code one up in python or even write a bash script. If I was gonna build an enigma, it better have all the gears and knobs that an original one did.

Maybe I don't understand WWII fandom, but I understand geekfandom, and if you're going to build something that used to be a gear device, I don't wanna emulate it on my dreamcast.

Now what would be cool is to build the vacuum tube based machine the allies used to crack various codes...

Re:Electronic Version? Why not just use software

[The Snowman]

Who would want an electronic version of the Enigma machine? You could just code one up in python or even write a bash script.

Yeah, but having the quasi-real *hardware* is cool, too.

Now what would be cool is to build the vacuum tube based machine the allies used to crack various codes...

I don't know about tubes, but transistors would be good (less problems, easier to replace). Either way it would be nice to have some replica hardware, just for nostalgia if nothing else. Knowing that modern computers have 10x the power of old mainframes that took up the entire first floor of my house is no good, my soviet russia wants a beowulf cluster of... nevermind :-)

Re:Electronic Version? Why not just use software

[kinema]

Maybe people just want a new elctronic device so they can attempt to port Linux and/or NetBSD.

Re:Electronic Version? Why not just use software

[Felinoid]

Who would want an electronic version of the Enigma machine?
A time travler...
And while we are at it if any time travlers are reading the Slashdot archives remember to pull the URL off the Wayback machine (Becouse no doupt the URL went away 25 years ago.. shortly after slashdotting).

I'm gona guess this saved you one jumps worth of fule so now if you'll jump over to 1979 and warn me to NOT go to my girlfriends HS.
(Thinking with the wrong orgen almost screwed my education... and her HS has a shotty computer lab)

Re:Electronic Version? Why not just use software

[panurge]

Unfortunately, in a completely incomprehensible fit of apparent insanity, Churchill ordered Colossus and its plans destroyed after WWII. It's strange that someone who was otherwise quite far-sighted (after visiting Bletchley, his memo read something like 'Give them everything they ask for immediately' ) could throw away a major technological advance.

Re:Electronic Version? Why not just use software

[1u3hr]

If I was gonna build an enigma, it better have all the gears and knobs that an original one did.

Enigma-replica. Though this guy tries to make all the parts as an original, he uses a lot of plastic rather than metal.

Re:Electronic Version? Why not just use software

[gujo-odori]

Almost screwed your education??

Umm, that's "organ" and "shoddy." I don't think there's any "almost" about it :-)

Re:Electronic Version? Why not just use software

[MichaelDelving]

My senior year science fair project was coding an Enigma-E in C-64 basic. Only took an afternoon - actually Sunday afternoon before the Monday it was due.

Took second place in the city Science Fair. Bleh.

Just think

[Bobdoer]

You could encode a secret message on this machine and then send it to a friend with a notice telling them to buy a machine too!
Seriously, beyond some amount of coolness (much less because it's an electronic version as opposed to a mechanical one) this doesn't have much use.

How does it work ??

[vinit79]

I looked at the site and the manuals arent online. I there any information abt how the enigma coding actually work ????

Re:How does it work ??

[Bobdoer]

This page explains Enigma fairly well.

Re:How does it work ??

[OverlordQ]

The Enigma machine was a simple cipher machine. It had several components: a plug board, a light board, a keyboard, a set of rotors, and a reflector (half rotor). The original machine looked a lot like a typewriter.

The machine has several variable settings that affect the operation of the machine. The user must select three rotors from a set of rotors to be used in the machine. A rotor contains one-to-one mappings of all the letters. Some Enigma machines had more than 3 rotors which just added to the number of possible encryption combinations. The other variable element in the machine is the plug board. The plug board allowed for pairs of letters to be remapped before the encryption process started and after it ended.

When a key is pressed, an electrical current is sent through the machine. The current first passes through the plug board, then through the three rotors, through the reflector which reverses the current, back through the three rotors, back through the plug board and then the encrypted letter is lit on the display. After the display is lit up, the rotors rotate. The rotors rotate similar to an odometer where the right most rotor must complete one revolution before the middle rotor rotated one position and so on.

As the current passes through each component in the Enigma machine, the letter gets remapped to another letter. The plug board performed the first remapping. If there is a connection between two letters, the letters are remapped to each other. For example if there is a connection between "A" and "F", "A" would get remapped to "F" and "F" would get remapped to "A". If this isn't a connection for a particular letter, the letter doesn't get remapped. After the plug board, the letters are remapped through the rotors. Each rotor contains one-to-one mappings of letters but since the rotors rotate on each key press, the mappings of the rotors change on every key press. Once the current passes through the rotors, it goes into the reflector. The reflector is very similar to a rotor except that it doesn't rotate so the one-to-one mappings are always the same. The whole encryption process for a single letter contains a minimum of 7 remappings (the current passes through the rotors twice) and a maximum of 9 remappings (if the letter has a connection in the plug board).

In order to decrypt a message, the receiver must have the encrypted message, and know which rotors were used, the connections on the plug board and the initial settings of the rotors. To decrypt a message, the receiver would set up the machine identically to the way the sender initially had it and would type in the encrypted message. The output of typing in the encrypted message would be the original message. Without the knowledge of the state of the machine when the original message was typed in, it is extremely difficult to decode a message.

Re:How does it work ??

[happyhippy]

Thank you for the link.

Re:How does it work ??

[Anonymous Coward]

There is some sort of description written by Turing himself

Re:How does it work ??

[urbaneassault]

if you're going to copy and paste, the least you could do is credit the source: http://www.ugrad.cs.jhu.edu/~russell/classes/enigm a/how.html

Re:How does it work ??

[Anonymous Coward]

He was asking how it worked, not for a link to someplace that asked where it worked. Fag.

Re:How does it work ??

[Ugmo]

It had several components: a plug board, a light board, a keyboard, a set of rotors, and a reflector (half rotor). The original machine looked a lot like a typewriter.

Thanks now I know how an Enigma machine works, now can anyone tell me what the heck a typewriter is? :)

RTFA

[Safety Cap]

We've also got a first in the manual: Frode Weierud and Geoff Sullivan, two well respected Enigma researchers, have aquired a large number of original German army messages, which have never been published before. Especially for the Enigma-E, they've released some of these messages, complete with the related Enigma settings and decrypts.

Re:RTFA

[dj245]

Now if only Bablefish could translate German with half the accuracy with which the Enigma machine decodes messages...

"Space Chase" translated to italian, to german, to french, to english, is "continuation of sector".

Who needs one?

[Sub-MOA]

I'll drop one off at Bletchley on the way to picking up my Gray's Sports Almanac.

Re:Who needs one?

[garbagedisposal]

"I'll drop one off at Bletchley on the way to picking up my Gray's Sports Almanac."

I say, could'nt make that two could you old boy?

Re:Who needs one?

[baldcamel]

Bletchly Park? What is that got to do with enigma?

I thought that it was the US Navy. Did U-571 lie to me?

Re:Who needs one?

[1u3hr]

I'll drop one off at Bletchley on the way to picking up my Gray's Sports Almanac.

The construction of the Enigma wasn't really the problem. The Enigma had been in use since the early 30s and the Poles knew exactly how they worked, and later shared that with the Allies as war grew closer and Poland was invaded. Decoding a message required knowing the settings used. At Bletchley Park they built "bombes" (originally following a Polish design) that could run decodes automatically hundreds of times faster than a real Enigma to try out the huge number of possible initial settings.

Actually a great deal of their success in decoding was due to sloppy methods used by the Germans. Having messages begin in a predictable way was a "crib" that enabled good guesses to be made of the settings. And even more directly, capturing code books with schedules of code settings, as was done several times, (but not by the Americans as was depicted in U571). If the Germans had used the Enigmas with due care they never would have been cracked.

However, it's rarely noted that the Germans were almost as good at decoding Allied signals. There's very little written about that, but I have seen notes that they could read just about any Royal Navy code, for instance.

Re:Who needs one?

[mlush]

Bletchly Park? What is that got to do with enigma?
I thought that it was the US Navy. Did U-571 lie to me?

U-571 had it right... Bletchly Park is just part of a British disinformation program to make you think we were involved in the D-Day landings.

Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[LostCluster]

Enigma was an interesting development in cryptography because the rotating wheels caused the crypto output to be evenly distributed accross the alphabet. Therefore, it couldn't be solved by the typical letter replacement cypher techniques of assuming the most used letter in the code stands for "E" until proven otherwise, and working from there.

An Enigma-based crypto engine for binary data might be quite the interesting modern update. Especially because a brute force guessing of a 256-byte wheel would take a long time, and three wheels on top of each other would send the probablities of guessing your way into it into the stratosphere.

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[The Snowman]

An Enigma-based crypto engine for binary data might be quite the interesting modern update. Especially because a brute force guessing of a 256-byte wheel would take a long time, and three wheels on top of each other would send the probablities of guessing your way into it into the stratosphere.

Granted Enigma encryption is weak by today's standards, I think this would be interesting nonetheless. But with today's hardware, we could add arbitrarily many rotors (wheels) with negligible speed difference. I am sure even a thousand rotors would not be slow, but it would make for a stronger cipher.

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[LostCluster]

The thing is, a 1000 rotor system of used for binary usage would result in a key that's 256,000 bytes long, and each message would reqire 1000 bytes of information as to where to start each wheel.

Then again, what better way to remind people that longer keys equals more power?

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[mlush]

Enigma was an interesting development in cryptography because the rotating wheels caused the crypto output to be evenly distributed accross the alphabet. Therefore, it couldn't be solved by the typical letter replacement cypher techniques of assuming the most used letter in the code stands for "E" until proven otherwise, and working from there.

One of the interesting weaknesses of the Enigma cypher was no letter could be encoded as itself. One part of the cracking process was to look for messages that had a known content (weather reports were a favorate, the Germans were very keen on standard formats in their reports) This could be used to narrow down the number of possible keys

Source A tired German operator has been told to send out dummy messages and he typed only the last letter of the keyboard : ``L''. The British code breaking expert immediately recognized the missing ``L'' in the enciphered message and they got a very big crib.

* [cipher]DAOACQAOFFNNHDYAPSGZHEPTWCFZEPAARVDZOSWJDH XMESGWSGRQYOZ
* [plain] LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL LLLLL

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[Ckwop]

Longer keys are not better.

The point of cryptography is to take a big secret, like a file, and turn it into a little secret which is the key. The idea being that a small secret is easier to protect than the bigger one.

A key that's 256,000 bytes long is a key that defeats the object of cryptography. How do you intend on storing 256,000 bytes securely?

People use 128-bit keys for a reason. They're big enough to avoid brute-force but small enough so that we can remember them (usually via a passphrase). We always want the *smallest* possible key that gives us security against brute-force.

Simon.

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[Ckwop]

You can generally build a secure cipher out of any old mathematical junk provided that you take care in assembly.

The thing is, in modern crytography we simply don't need a rotor. A rotor system could be made very complicated indeed and complication is not good for security. Most ciphers use a static substitution as their non-linear step because when designing a cipher we want it to be simple to analyse.

That might sound counter-intuative but think about it. If I can prove my cipher can withstand attacks A,B & C then that's a bonus. If your cipher is too complicated to build proofs of security against attacks A, B & C we can't be sure it's secure against them.

This is why most modern ciphers are fairly simple designs but due to this simplicity, we have a huge weight of analysis behind them.

Simon.

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[91degrees]

I've heard that story before. It surprises me. While an enigma will generate convincing random letters, and it makes sense to use one for that, it's surprising that he bothered setting up his machine to use the day's settings.

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[mlush]

I've heard that story before. It surprises me. While an enigma will generate convincing random letters, and it makes sense to use one for that, it's surprising that he bothered setting up his machine to use the day's settings.

The problem with Enigma was that Enigma was unbreakable and if its unbreakable you don't have to bother with all this singals discipline. Some operators were allowed to select their own 'random' message keys (thus the code breakers became experts on German swearwords!)

I'd guess machine was probably already set up and the other end was having problems decrypting

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[UnknowingFool]

One of the interesting weaknesses of the Enigma cypher was no letter could be encoded as itself. One part of the cracking process was to look for messages that had a known content (weather reports were a favorate, the Germans were very keen on standard formats in their reports) This could be used to narrow down the number of possible keys

Like many cryptographics systems, it was not beaten soley by technology. Human factors also played a factor. The Germans believed so much in the technology that they did not address the humans as much.

The Luftwaffe messages were consistently broken because they did stupid things. Some operators sent the same propaganda message at the same time every day. Part of the setting for every message was for the operator to choose a random message specific key. Lazy operators used the same key over and over again.

The Navy was more careful but humans also foiled the system. Instead of letting the operators choose a message key, they had a code book for the choosing the key and a code book for the other settings. All code books were printed on paper that disintegrated in water. One of the duties of a UBoat captain was to toss the books and the machine into the sea if they had to abandon ship or were about to be captured. One captain who hit a mine and abandoned his ship went back not to destroy the machine or the books but to get his treasured poems. The British captured a machine but more important the code books.

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[Jim Starx]

Thats incorrect. The idea isn't to protect a smaller message, the idea is to only have to protect a message once. The weakest link in any cryptography protocol is the key, reguardless of how big it is. This needs to be transfered to the other party with 100% certainty that it hasn't been observed. This generally means its delivered by hand and under heavy protection. All cryptography algorithms are breakable, the point of the algorithm is make the time needed to break the message invalidate the messages content. Sucessful encryption doesn't mean the message will never be read, it means it won't be read in time. For instance if your ordering a bombing raid to take place in 24 hours and your encryption takes 36 hours to break then even though it only took them a day and a half to break it, your encryption was successful. As the size of the key rises the time taken to break it also rises, exponentially. Larger keys are allways preferred. 256 bits is enough to make brute force attacks infeasable, but most attacks on cyptography systems are much more refined then brute force. In 1995 acceptable key lengths for public key encryption systems were 768 for an induvidual, 1280 for a corporation, and 1536 for the government.

During the cold war some soviet spy's would use an encryption scheme where a single bit of the key would decrypt a single bit of the message, after decryption the bits of the key that were used to decrypt were thrown away. The key had to be huge and it could only be used for a certain number of messages. That type of encryption is called a one time pad, it's nearly impossible to break. The common encryption schemes today like RSA or DES go for reusable keys but you still need to switch your key's every so often.

Generally the idea is to make the key as large as possible. There will always be a cap in how large one can go. Limitations in computing power can make the time needed to decrypt a message with a large key unacceptable. Maybe the key needs to fit onto some ealy concealable physical medium, or maybe it needs to be remembered. The idea is to acertain your upper limit and use keys that are that length. Keep in mind that 256,000 bytes is only 250 MB, without compression I can fit 3 of those on a CD.

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

"Keep in mind that 256,000 bytes is only 250 MB, without compression I can fit 3 of those on a CD."

256,000 bytes is 256k, you could fit 5 of them onto a floppy. And ideally the key would be random enough that it wouldnt be well compressible.

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[Handpaper]

Keep in mind that 256,000 bytes is only 250 MB, without compression I can fit 3 of those on a CD
Er.. 256,000 bytes is less than 256Kb - you can fit almost 3000 of them on a CD. Keys are supposed to be as random as possible - if it compresses significantly its not random (listen (cat to /dev/dsp) to a compressed and uncompressed file and you'll hear whet I mean)

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[Jim Starx]

Oops... I guess KB does come after byte doesn't it....

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[Ckwop]

The weakest link in any cryptography protocol is the key, reguardless of how big it is.

That's totally incorrect. In fact, the weakest link is almost never the key size. The failure point in protocols often has nothing to do with the security of the underlying cryptographic primative. PGP's file format lead to a break in the PGP system without attacking any of the cryptographic primatives. Similarly, SSL was broken on netscape because of a faulty choice of random number generator. Wep was broken in 802.11b devices due a series of flaws that didn't break the underlying algorithms. Cipher design is very difficult but it's only the easy part. Protocols are a nightmare.

During the cold war some soviet spy's would use an encryption scheme where a single bit of the key would decrypt a single bit of the message, after decryption the bits of the key that were used to decrypt were thrown away. The key had to be huge and it could only be used for a certain number of messages. That type of encryption is called a one time pad, it's nearly impossible to break. The common encryption schemes today like RSA or DES go for reusable keys but you still need to switch your key's every so often.

It is unbreakable but people often sing it's praises and neglect the fact you have to get this key to the other party you want to communicate with. Since the One time pad (OTP) is the *same* size as the plain-text you want to communicate then surely it's just as easy to communicate the actual message? In some cases it's useful, like where you can give someone they pad before they start their covert mission but in a modern internet setting the OTP is useless.

Generally the idea is to make the key as large as possible. There will always be a cap in how large one can go. Limitations in computing power can make the time needed to decrypt a message with a large key unacceptable. Maybe the key needs to fit onto some ealy concealable physical medium, or maybe it needs to be remembered. The idea is to acertain your upper limit and use keys that are that length

Again, another misconception. Bigger keys do not have a huge impact on performance if your using a block cipher. I could make DES use 768-bit keys if I dumped the key schedule and used independant subkeys. It wouldn't improve it's security either. Infact, differential cryptanalysis of DES and it's varient is generally done by assuming the subkeys are independant. Bigger keys do not always equal bigger security.

I stand by my original analysis. Smaller keys are better because they're easier to protect. The only need to be big enough to resist brute-force and there is no use in increasing the size further.

Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense

[Jim Starx]

That's totally incorrect. In fact, the weakest link is almost never the key size. The failure point in protocols often has nothing to do with the security of the underlying cryptographic primative.

When I said the weakest point was the key I wasn't refering to key length, I was actually refering to failure to protect the key. I agree with you that the overwhelming majority of failures occur in the protocols and have nothing to do with the security of the encryption.

It is unbreakable but people often sing it's praises and neglect the fact you have to get this key to the other party you want to communicate with. Since the One time pad (OTP) is the *same* size as the plain-text you want to communicate then surely it's just as easy to communicate the actual message?

Well, the encryption can't be broken per se. The only way to 'break' this type of encryption is to guess the key. When computers were still relatively new random number generators were actually pseudo-random, meaning that if you obtained a portion of the key it was possible to reconstruct the algorithm that produced it. That made it feasable to attempt that type of attack. But nowadays there are real-random algorithms who's results cannot be reproduced. Its worth noting that these are considered real-random because the results can not be recreated or predicted by techniques we are aware of, which is exactly why older pseudo-random generators were thought to be real random.

Also, your argument about message size, I don't understand why you think size is relevant. Storage mediums are so fantastically huge nowadays the issue of size is unimportant. The idea remains that only one message must be securely sent, all other messages can be encrypted and then transmitted openly.

Bigger keys do not have a huge impact on performance if your using a block cipher... Smaller keys are better because they're easier to protect. The only need to be big enough to resist brute-force and there is no use in increasing the size further

Admittedly I don't know as much about DES and block ciphers as I do about RSA and public encryption schemes. In RSA, which is based in modular arithmetic, key size adds to the number of calculations required, which adds to processing time. Also sense breaking RSA is equivilent to factoring the key into its primes, larger keys take more time to factor and hence are more secure. Whether the same is true of DES I am not entirely sure. I would argue that even if one is only concerned about brute force attacks a larger key is still safer. M.J. Wiener published 2 papers titled "Efficient DES Key Search" that showed that a machine capable of executing a brute force attack against DES's 56 bit key standard would cost only 1 million and could perform the attack in 3 and a half hours. Those papers were published in 93 and 94, and the cost of that machine was predicted to drop by a factor of 5 every 10 years. It's common sense to assume that the NSA has built a machine like this and Harris Corp did actually build one using a Cray Y-MP; although I believe it was based on contextual algorithms that ruled out sets of keys based on partial solutions, I'm not sure how efficient that is compared to Wiener's method. Rumors abound that the NSA can crack DES in 3 to 15 minutes and considering DES has been the standard for about 20 years now I wouldn't be terribly suprised if that was true.

applet

[batura]

I thought this was kinda cool, so I looked around for a java applet and found one: Its pretty cool.

Re:applet

[The Snowman]

I wonder if the real Nazi Enigma machines also had Java.lang.NullPointerException errors...

Re:applet

[mattjb0010]

I thought this was kinda cool

WAKHPUZNZF

Re:applet

[Lord_Slepnir]

They did, however the Nazis took a much harsher point of view on NullPointerException errors, and there were few that survived the war. In 1961 the new German government recognized the suffering they caused the NullPointerExceptions, and establised the free state of Javaoinia as a place to house the survivors. However, they accidently encroached on the territory owned by the SegFault republic, and the area is a hot bed for violent activity.

Oh, well in that case...

[mynameis (mother ...]

I was thinking to myself "This is way too difficult to build..."

But then I noticed that the 65+ page manual includes:

How to build a wooden box

And if that wasn't enough, the fact that it has

Full 26-key keyboard with key-click sound
sealed the deal!

I really wanted to make a Darl joke, but alas...

Herzlicher Glukwunsch...

Enigma cracking: Circa 2004

[LostCluster]

If an e-mail message were to be encoded using Enigma, does there exist any modern-era software for cracking it? Or would the US Government be forced to pull out the vacuum tubes and crack it the way they did in WWII again?

Re:Enigma cracking: Circa 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll.

It was the Poles who initially cracked it and the Brits, who at first failed to realize its full potential, put it to good use. US had nothing to do with it.

Re:Enigma cracking: Circa 2004

[The Snowman]

If an e-mail message were to be encoded using Enigma, does there exist any modern-era software for cracking it? Or would the US Government be forced to pull out the vacuum tubes and crack it the way they did in WWII again?

I doubt that a cracking program would have the Enigma algorithm built-in, but Enigma is suceptible to a type of brute force attack. Generally you can do heuiristic analysis on a cipher to get a good head start, then brute force a smaller subset of the data. On modern hardware this would probably take a few seconds, if that long.

Re:Enigma cracking: Circa 2004

[WWWWolf]

Enigma encryption might have been a great leap ahead and looked completely state of art in the WW2, but today, it's quite trivial to crack. Enigma could be easily bruteforced - just check through the entire keyspace.

It also probably wouldn't stand too long if real crypto breakers who knew their stuff would start their job without knowing anything about the encryption scheme, even. The science has gone so far in recent times.

And an easy way to illustrate: Compare output from Enigma with any modern cipher. Enigma output looks like completely mangled words - the text is garbled, the layout of the message is exposed. Modern cipher output looks like a completely random arrangement of bits, everything completely spread around the message with no point to really take a good grip on. With Enigma, if you know that Nazi guy is always putting "Heil Hitler" at the end, you have already cracked that much of the message.

If the thing looks trivial, then it probably is. If it doesn't, it probably isn't. Of course, this isn't always true in either way.

Now I'll get more coffee so I can start making sense today.

Re:Enigma cracking: Circa 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

And you got modded UP ??
Man I want some of the stuff the mods are smoking !

BWHAHAHAHA stupid mods!
RTFA or educate yourself about enigma and then maybe you wont fucking trolls asking "Hey can US break Enigma now ?"

Re:Enigma cracking: Circa 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

It was the Poles who initially cracked it and the Brits, who at first failed to realize its full potential, put it to good use. US had nothing to do with it.

Yeah, I saw that movie too. ;-)

Re:Enigma cracking: Circa 2004

[Registered Coward v2]

Not quite true - Enigma wa scracked not only through brillant code breaking, but through a technique even older than computers - steal the device used to enchiper the message, along with the code books. The Brits captured two devices, plus the vital encoding information, from two German submarines. The US captured one when the U505 was boarded and captured in the North Atlantic. The Poles, if I recall correctly, also captured a device - an Army one though, not a Navy one.

Key was the codes used to set the wheels - that enabled decryption of messages for the period that the code was used. Of course, since Enigma used a sophisticated non-repeating cypher (at least for short messages), the Germans believed it uncrackable and failed to take precautions when faced with the possibility. Of course, we made the same assumptions about our codes during the Cold war, only to later discover the USSR used the age old technique on us - pay someone to steal them.

Interestingly enough, the US used a variant for coding messages well into the '70s., giving US subamariners a strange link to their WWII German counterparts.

Re:Enigma cracking: Circa 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

How fucking stupid are you? Just shut the fuck up, you don't know what you're talking about. The actual breaking was done by British mathematicians, the US had nothing to do with it, I bet you're an American, fuck sake it's people like you that make the rest of us look so fucking stupid and the joke of the world. go die.

Re:Enigma cracking: Circa 2004

[raytracer]

I implemented an Enigma-cracking program when I was trying to crack the codes in Simon Singh's Cipher Challenge presented in The Code Book. It was a great deal of fun, and required just the right mix of learning, hacking and debugging to accomplish. Eventually I cracked 7 out of 10 of the ciphers (all the ones I expected to be within reasonable grasp).

The first difficulty was finding a sufficiently detailed description of the Enigma machine itself, so that I could write a simulator. Eventually I found a fairly good description of the machine, and some cleartext/ciphertext pairs to try it against. Initially there was a minor problem, which I eventually submitted as a plea to a newsgroup and received a quick response from an eGroup member as to the bug. Voila! A working simulator.

I took advice from Jim Gillogly and his cipher text only break of the Enigma machine. I suspected the final text would be German, so I built a table of trigraph frequencies from Goethe's Faust, which I downloaded from Project Gutenberg. I then coded up a simple hill climbing algorithm which proceeded by Scanning all possible rotor orders (six of them) and all possible rotor positions (26^3), looking for the text with the trigraph score, and then refining that by hillclimbing by redoing the plugboard.

It worked the very first time: out popped the flawless decrypt in less than three minutes on my old 133Mhz P5.

Singh's challenge was signficantly aided by the fact that his ciphertext was quite a bit longer than the recommended message length that was actually used in the War. My experience in trying to crack shorter messages was that the statistics used to guide the search were often unreliable, and the likelihood of getting a successful automatic decrypt were quite a bit lower.

Re:Enigma cracking: Circa 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear. The US government didn't crack Enigma - the British did. The story of Bletchley Park may have been secret for 30 years after the war, but has been fairly well-known since the mid 70s.

And before anyone brings it up, Colossus, the world's first electronic digital computer, built at the Post Office Research station at Dollis Hill in London, was a) not designed by Alan Turing and b) not designed for cracking Enigma, but rather the "Fish" codes, based on the Lorenz SZ40 and SZ42, the Schusselzusatz ("cipher attachment")

Re:Enigma cracking: Circa 2004

[calidoscope]

US had nothing to do with it.

Not quite true - the US did supply a good number of the Bombes used for determing the steckers and wheel settings.

What made the Enigma easy to crack was that the signals through the rotors were reflected - which greatly limited the encoding space.

What the Poles did in cracking the Enigma was nothing compared to what Friedman did in cracking Japan's "Purple Code". The Poles knew how the Enigma was built, Friedman had to deduce how the "Purple" box worked.

Re:Enigma cracking: Circa 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

Brute force is viable now. However, there are smarter ways to attack it using the nature of language and the distribution of letters within written passages. See Ciphertext-Only Cryptanalysis of ENIGMA by James J. Gillogly (http://members.fortunecity.com/jpeschel/gillog1.h tm) for an approach. This is the method I used to crack the ENIGMA message in Simon Singh's The Code Book.

Nah they just send you to that place in Cuba..

[Anonymous Coward]

After a few years you would spill the beans..

Re:Too late

[LostCluster]

Understanding the past is a key to ruling the future.

It's just like how American-Indian "Windtalkers" could befudle opposing intercepters simply by speaking their native language. It's really hard to crack a code when you don't know what the encoding process used was in the first place. You can't brute force guess keys until you know what you're supposed to do with them.

Building replicas

[defectorg]

This guy is making a replica of an Enigma.
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ertel is working on making duplicates which you can buy completely build here.

Re:Too late

[WhodoVoodoo]

Right you are, But I could have used this to hand-encode all my Kazaa packets until YOU had to go and spill the beans! Thanks a BUNCH! Now they'll add Enigma support to carnivore, and I'm stuck with IPSEC!

Way to go, commie!
=P

Nobody cracked anything

[Anonymous Coward]

They found a working Engima and the codebooks on a German UBoat.

SSH

[bluewee]

I rather use SSH, unless I can get the plans to an actual machine.

Bummer

[iswm]

Too bad this isn't available in the US. It would make a really nice gift (To me).

Re:Bummer

[bearl]

In the first paragraph of the order page:
"Both addresses below do ship worldwide so ordering one shouldn't be a problem."

Enigma-E Order Page

Python implementation of rotor encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

Documented here.

It's in the standard library and supports an arbitraary number of rotors. I don't know if it's strictly compatible with the original Enigma, though.

Am I the only person who...

[Zakabog]

...read this as "Do-It-Yourself Electronic Enema Machine"? I probably wouldn't have if I knew what an Enigma Machine was (yeah yeah I'll read the stuff now)

Re:Am I the only person who...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. You were indeed the only one. Now whats the settings to encrypt "Der anal-meister" on this enigma thingy....

Re:Am I the only person who...

[Bones3D_mac]

Have you read the first post at the top of this page? ;-)

Re:Am I the only person who...

[Anonymous Coward]

ya -- i read it and thought "duh, no electronics are necessary. i made mine with a small funnel and a garden hose."

Re:Am I the only person who...

[FisterBelvedere]

FisterBelveder read it the same, but only because I need a Do-it-yourself electronic enema machine, the Fister could always use some help.

This is an interesting...

[SisyphusShrugged]

This is an interesting little project, I remember learning about the history of the battle over the Enigma code in Computer Science, and the Colossus, the first programmable electronic computer...maybe now you can emulate a replica of the Colossus, the computer used to decipher the Enigma, and have a mini-WW2 cryptography battle on your computer!

An interesting piece of history...

Re:This is an interesting...

[Richard_L_James]

maybe now you can emulate a replica of the Colossus, the computer used to decipher the Enigma, and have a mini-WW2 cryptography battle on your computer!

Tony Sale the expert who rebuilt Colossus has also created a Virtual Bletchley Park part of his website which includes a Virtual Colossus that you can run via the web. However it is recommended to read the instructions (PDF) first!.

Re:This is an interesting...

[mlush]

maybe now you can emulate a replica of the Colossus, the computer used to decipher the Enigma

Colossus was not used to crack Enigma it was built to crack the Lorenz machine (a high security teleprinter cipher). One of the interesting things was Bletchley Park was able to build a Lorenz machine without ever seeing a real one!

Here is a dirty great quote from here

The first intercepts

The teleprinter signals being transmitted by the Germans, and enciphered using Lorenz, were first heard in early 1940 by a group of policemen on the South Coast who were listening out for possible German spy transmissions from inside the UK.

Brigadier John Tiltman, one of the top codebreakers in Bletchley Park, took a particular interest in these enciphered teleprinter messages. They were given the code name Fish. The messages which (as was later found out) were enciphered using the Lorenz machine, were known as Tunny. Tiltman knew of the Vernam system and soon identified these messages as being enciphered in the Vernam manner.

Because the Vernam system depended on addition of characters, Tiltman reasoned that if the operators made a mistake and used the same Lorenz machine starts for two messages (a depth), then by adding the two cipher texts together character by character, the obscuring character sequence would disappear. He would then be left with a sequence of characters each of which represented the addition of the two characters in the original German message texts. For two completely different messages it is virtually impossible to assign the correct characters to each message. Just small sections at the start could be derived but not complete messages.

The German mistake
As the number of intercepts, now being made at Knockholt in Kent, increased a section was formed in Bletchley Park headed by Major Ralph Tester and known as the Testery. A number of Depths were intercepted but not much headway had been made into breaking the cipher until the Germans made one horrendous mistake. It was on 30 August 1941. A German operator had a long message of nearly 4,000 characters to be sent from one part of the German Army High command to another probably Athens to Vienna. He correctly set up his Lorenz machine and then sent a twelve letter indicator, using the German names, to the operator at the receiving end. This operator then set his Lorenz machine and asked the operator at the sending end to start sending his message. After nearly 4,000 characters had been keyed in at the sending end, by hand, the operator at the receiving end sent back by radio the equivalent, in German, of didn't get that send it again.

They now both put their Lorenz machines back to the same start position. Absolutely forbidden, but they did it. The operator at the sending end then began to key in the message again, by hand. If he had been an automaton and used exactly the same key strokes as the first time then all the interceptors would have got would have been two identical copies of the cipher text. Input the same machines generating the same obscuring characters same cipher text. But being only human and being thoroughly disgusted at having to key it all again, the sending operator began to make differences in the second message compared to the first.

The message began with that well known German phrase SPRUCHNUMMER message number in English. The first time the operator keyed in S P R U C H N U M M E R. The second time he keyed in S P R U C H N R and then the rest of the message text. Now NR means the same as NUMMER, so what difference did that make? It meant that immediately following the N the two texts were different. But the machines were generating the same obscuring sequence, therefore the cipher texts were different from that point on.

The interceptors at Knockholt realised the possible importance of these two

LEGO Mindstorms

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought it would be cool to make an Enigma from LEGO.

Re:LEGO Mindstorms

[JeffTL]

It'd take some serious electrical and/or mechanical work, because the Mindstorms control brick (last I checked) only has three ports for sensors et cetera; well, actually, you could probably do the input with Morse code.
From there either use an alternate OS to show the result on the screen, or else use the motors somehow to run a mechanical display.

Enigma Books

[iplead5th]

I recomend to anyone who would like this Enigma machine thingy--or anyone interested in learning more about cryptography--to go out and get The Code Book by Simon Singh. Amazon It explains in a fair amount of detail how cryptography works, but also the history behind it. I remember it having a chapter or two on the Enigma Machine and also how they broke it. It was a very interesting read, but it isn't a techinical book, more for reader enjoyment and probably at the level of anyone who wants to build this kit. There are some puzzles on the back that are pretty hard to solve, although it would be cool to use this enigma machine to solve the enigma code in the back--you would still have to figure out all the settings, so it would be impossible and not help at all, but imagine the cool factor. There are a lot of other great books on cryptography but this is the only one I have read yet so I feel its the only one I'm allowed to recomend to you guys.

Excellent

[pagaman]

Now I can encrypt all of my personal messages. I just hope no one works out a way to decrypt them ;)

Simple Cipher Machine

[Anonymous Coward]

You're joking, aren't you ?

I can finally talk to the Germans!

[SPYDER Web]

Now if I only spoke german....

user feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what other users say about the Enigma-E:
Toyally Sucks! A.Hitler
Totally Rocks! W Churchill

The problem with decoding original nazi messages..

[Kinniken]

Is that once you have decoded them, which is a cool, "geek" task, they are in German! And translating German to English or whatever your language is is much less fun and much harder for the average geek ;-)

Just immagine...

[Op7imus_Prim3]

A Beowulf Cluster of enigma machines would be totally unbreakable!

Level of difficulty

[cancerward]

In case any of you think that the Enigma was "broken" by the boffins of Bletchley Park, and with Gillogly's ciphertext-only attack, became "ancient history", there are some ciphertexts from WW2 produced with the 4-rotor machine which have never been broken. (People have been so foolish as to say "Enigma is a joke to crack for my desktop"...)

Re:Level of difficulty

[Lumpy]

that is because it was really done with an 8 rotor enigma.

output of enigma1 was input into enigma2 then transmitted.

there was a couple of accounts from some of the higher up officials that eluded to that this was a practice that was used near the end of the war for really important things.

Re:Level of difficulty

[Anonymous Coward]

True. One must remember that Enigma cracks were based on the predictability of the keys.

Captured codebooks and poorly chosen keys (like the modern-day "password") really led to the compromise of the system as-implemented, not a compromise of the machine itself.

Re:Original Messages (not quite good enough....)

[TygerFish]

Of course, I will now be modded down as an anti-German racist

Well, no. You should be modded down as an anti-soldier bigot.

The former poster wrote about the German Government's maintaining pensions to former Nazi soldiers without regard to actions during their service (e.g., a mass-murderer getting extra money for being wounded trying to escape). He suggests that there is an injustice in this because nazi victims often received less compensation.

The latter poster, claiming that the former is bigoted against soldiers is missing or ignoring the former's main (and quite simple) point: people who should have been tried for crimes against humanity should probably not receive more compensation than those who narrowly escaped them.

In arguing for a nation's love for and responsibility to the men who serve it as soldiers, and extending it by obtuse omission to war-criminals, the second poster ignores historical precedent and insults the soldiers of every army that ever had fought for any decent purpose.

The outcome of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem made it perfectly clear that *some* military orders (shooting unarmed civilians, murdering soldiers who surrender, etc.) should not and cannot be obeyed.

When such orders are given, it is the soldier's duty to think not of his country but of civilisation and do whatever is necessary to not carry out those orders and some soldiers have actually done just that--like Israeli pilots who refused to take part in missions against the palestinians.

The comparison of Nazi units charged murdering jews, allied prisoners, securing slave-labor, etc. is particularly insulting in that the United State's invasion and occupation of Iraq is one of the worst decisions an American President has made in decades. The whole thing was and is a bad idea--a stupid and naive pursuit of political gain and personal desire which can in no way be seen as commensurate with the United State's security, nor with the stability of the Middle-East.

I believe all of this is true with respect to the dog's breakfast of policy in Iraq, however the mission brief of U.S. soldiers currently serving in the Gulf probably does not include 'aid in the work of rounding up the intelligentsia for early extermination,' nor any one of scores of other tasks that the Nazis acommplished throughout occupied Europe.

For the sake of intellectual rigor if nothing else, Please think through your comparisons more thoroughly in future.

Re:Are you an asshat?

[gujo-odori]

The majority of *rich* Singaporeans are Chinese, but the majority of Singaporeans are Malays, and the great majority of them are Muslims.

But no worries, the ones you'll get laid by are Chinese, and they're hot.

I'm waiting for...

[m_dob]

... the do-it-yourself Turing bombe

They can read it

[Anonymous Coward]

So, why make messages they can de-crypt in a matter of seconds like in WW2?

It ain't safe :(

Pure crap

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know what you're talking about.

Re:No thank you...

[Erratio]

The parent isn't offtopic...apparently the moderator just didn't get it. That's what popped into my head when I saw the story.

Re:Too late

[Richard_at_work]

The navajo indian code talkers did not "simply speak their native language". They actually had a code book to work from to translate english based orders into almost unrelated navajo words, so you get a sort of two level code system. The japanese captured several non code talking navajo indians in the course of the conflict, and these proved to be useless at decoding the talk.

In a similiar situation, one time pad encoded transmissions by Allied and Soviet spies during and after WW2 were dual encoded, first each word was encoded from plain text into a 4 digit number, and from there added to the onetime pad. This ended up with a situation where you could break the one time pad cyphers due to sloppy reuse of the pads on the soviet part, but then you had the task of matching up the numbers to words using a code book you can never see. Its not as easy as people make it out to be, less than 1% of all Venona traffic captured was ever broken, and then most were only broken by a word, thus useless.

You mean like this?

[Nick_Gunz]

Now what would be cool is to build the vacuum tube based machine the allies used to crack various codes...

The bombe was the first significant such electo-mechanical device used by the allies. Based on the Polish Bomba, incidentally.

Later they turned to Colossus, thought by many to be the first true computer.

Both are being rebuilt at Bletchely Park by a team of volunteers. Very cool, in my opinion.

Mine says....

[ioscan]

Drink more Ovaltine.

Re:Mine says....

[Anonymous Coward]

Sonofabitch...

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Richard_at_work (517087)

lol nice oxymoron there mate!

There: Sad, But True

[Anonymous Coward]

We've noticed that you're currently using a non-supported browser.

Please switch to Internet Explorer v. 5.0.1 or later to continue.

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You do not need to switch your default browser settings.

ROT13

[Anonymous Coward]

'nuff said.

I donno..

[nurb432]

I wouldnt put Steve on the same level as Woz.

Steve is smart, dont get me wrong, and did a lot of cool things ( yes i remember back then too, or even earlier with Popular Electronics.... ) but Steve had much more modern chips to work with, and used databooks for 'ideas' far too often..

Woz had to come up with the stuff from scratch...

Re:I donno..

[goodbye_kitty]

did anyone notice that the guy in the background on the picture of woz and steve jobs at woz.org is the same guy from that bogus 9/11 tourist photo that went around the net for a while?!!!!!!

Re:I donno..

[Anonymous Coward]

1972-2001! And he hasn't aged a bit!

Re:I donno..

[goodbye_kitty]

this is freaking me out! =/

Re:I donno..

[jrockway]

That is really weird. That guy is weird looking in the 9/11 picture, but even weirder in the Woz photo. Is he photoshopped in in the Woz picture??

Re:I donno..

[0x1337]

No Jon, he is like Woz' best friend, like totally. Do ignore the fact that he is dressed like he is touring the North Pole, and that he totally doesn't corresepond to the Depth-Of-Field of the rest of the image, oh, and that he didn't age at all in 25 years.

Colossus

[FraggedSquid]

I remeber watching a TV show about Bletchly Park a few years ago. They interviewed one of the code breakers about the Colossus computer. They retired codebreaker remarked that he had written a machine-code implementation of the Colossus and ran it on the fasted PC he could find, but the hardware Colossus was still quicker at code breaking. Station X

So... whos gonna reprint the thing

[nurb432]

Assuming the manuals have everything you need, who will be the first to publish the book for those of us that want to scrounge for parts too...

A more astounding wrongness.

[FeriteCore]

It is a much more astounding wrongness to wrongly accuse another of astounding wrongness.

UNIX, and by implecation the encryption of passwords in /etc/passwd predates the publication of DES by a number of years. It would have been impossible for the password hash to have always used DES.

I was actualy USING Unix version 7 when the adoption of DES as a standard was being debated. My Version 7 UNIX manuals (all two volumes) are boxed away somewhere. I recall a warning in the manual about the enigma based crypt having known weakness. My understanding was that this same algorithm was used for the /etc/passwd hash, but I cannot state that with certainty at this late date. What is certain is that it wasn't DES.

Re:A more astounding wrongness.

[John Hasler]

My 7th Edition manuals (copyright 1979) indicate that crypt(1) used Enigma and crypt(3) used DES. I agree that something else must have been used early on, but I can't say for sure that it was Enigma.

Re:A more astounding wrongness.

[FeriteCore]

Checking some dates, that is about three years after the official publication of DES as a standardard. I suppose it was publicly available for comment for some time before that.

I was obviously confusing post-publication controversy with pre-publication controversy.

1979 is about when I was starting to use Version 7.

Re:A more astounding wrongness.

[MobyTurbo]

Checking some dates, that is about three years after the official publication of DES as a standardard.

Yes, for Version 7. Unix has existed going back to 1969, nearly a decade earlier. I'm not sure how old crypt(3) is, but I do recall they were describing what crypt was when it was first implemented. Like I said though, what I recall of what I heard (how's that for hear-say?) did not specify whether it was talking about crypt(1), which *is* Enigma-based, or crypt(3). I wish there was a grizzled veteren out there who knows what crypt(3) was during it's implementation, prior to DES if it's a very old library function, so we can establish if it was ever like crypt(1) in it's algorithm.

M4 Enigma?

[Spunk]

Wait a minute....

$ which m4
/usr/bin/m4

I already have this installed!

Churchill? Far sighted?

[benzapp]

You mean the man who dragged Europe into a war to save Poland? But then surrendered them to the communists? The same Churchill who agreed to surrender half of Europe to soviet occupation? who agreed to long term leases that bankrupted the UK well into the 60's and ultimately caused the collapse of the Empire?

Re:Churchill? Far sighted?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same Churchill who agreed to surrender half of Europe to soviet occupation?

No, that would be the American presidents Roosevelt and Truman... Churchill spent his time warning people that the Soviet Union was an enormous threat. Poland being handed over to Stalin was a something that haunted him for years -- there was simply nothing he could have done about it, short of a war with the Soviets, which the Americans had no stomach for.

As for bankrupting the Empire -- you can also thank the Americans for that too. Britain's war debts to the U.S were still being paid off into the 1980s. The U.S. systematically stripped the U.K of territory and assets (especially those in the U.S) before agreeing to join the war against fascism. So much for the "why we fight" meme that the U.S. likes to put about. The UK was the only country to directly face down Hitler on ethical grounds, and it paid the cost... the U.S war profiteered its way to super-power status.

Re:Churchill? Far sighted?

[Stone Pony]

Churchill wasn't Prime Minister in 1939, Neville Chamberlain was. Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, after the fall of Norway.

Chamberlain's late-30s policy of appeasement remains controversial. It has been interpreted variously as a policy born of moral cowardice or as one founded on a realistic assessment of Britain's military strength (for example, the RAF only began re-equipping with modern monoplane fighters - the Spitfire and Hurricane - in 1938).

Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister in May 1940, but remained a member of Churchill's war cabinet. He resigned on ill-health grounds in October 1940 and died the following month. Churchill's speech in the House of Commons on November 12, 1940, is a very generous assessment of Chamberlain's role in the build-up to war.

Re:Churchill? Far sighted?

[benzapp]

There is a very big difference between declaring war and going to war as any knowledge of the phony war would attest.

There were no significant battles until AFTER Churchill became prime minister. After a year of trying to find a compromise for the French And English declaration of war, something had to be done and France was conquered. Historically this made sense. France had invaded Germany constantly for hundreds of years, it was wise to assume it would happen again.

I love the speech you just quoted as well, what was that about that filthy traitor Benjamin Disraeli?

Re:Churchill? Far sighted?

[Stone Pony]

I don't see what you're getting at. By the time Churchill became Prime Minister, Germany had already conquered Poland, Denmark and Norway (and Czechoslovakia, albeit before the outbreak of the war). Within days of his taking the job, Belgium and Holland had been conquered; and within weeks, France. I think that it's safe to say that those countries would have been invaded whether Churchill had become PM or not.

I accept that Churchill could, in theory, have sued for peace at some point early in his period of office (presumably after the fall of France). Hitler certainly hoped that that would happen (hence his "last appeal to reason" speech in the Reichstag on 19 July). On the other hand, if there was any widespread political will in Britain to make peace:

• Why was Chamberlain forced out? He could have extracted the country from the war just as readily as Churchill.
• Why was Churchill the popular choice to replace him, rather than Halifax? Anyone arguing for Churchill must have known what they were going to get: his views on the conduct of the war weren't exactly a secret, whereas Halifax was far more likely to entertain the idea of reaching a settlement.

So I would suggest that Churchill was only reflecting - and very skilfully articulating - the national mood (not universally held, no doubt, but generally adhered to) in his refusal to countenance a peace. Furthermore, by the time he was in a position to wield any significant influence on the issue, the war was about a great deal more than the fate of Poland. The 1939 population of the countries occupied by the Germans by July 1940 was:

• Poland 35 million (not all under German occupation, but all under totalitarian occupations)
• Denmark 4 million
• Norway 3 million
• Holland 9 million (including Luxemburg in here: it rounds out the same)
• Belgium 8 million
• France 42 million (not all under German occupation)

(all figures taken from here: you need the pages suffixed with a "c")

I don't know how the Polish and French populations split between German/Soviet occupation and German occupation/Vichy government, but even if we assume that only half the population of each country was subject to German rule, that's still over sixty million people. Not to mention the strategic significance of a single power commanding the entire coast of Europe from the North Cape to the Bay of Biscay (and beyond, taking into account the fascist governments in Spain and Portugal). That in itself was something which Britain had fought more than once to prevent - in the Napoleonic Wars, for example.

I am absolutely not blind to Churchill's faults, but your initial posting seems to me to be an utterly bizarre interpretation of the causes of the war in Europe and Churchill's part in it.

Enigma decrypt

[earthforce_1]

Decrypting Enigma messages were made much easier, because of human weaknesses. The operator would first send a 3 letter position for the plugboard in plaintext, and the operator would chose the remaining 3 for the rotor. The Bletchley park decoders could easily guess that if BER was sent, they guy on the other end would set his rotors to LIN. LON would be followed by -DON. HIT by -LER. Another Enigma operator would always use the initials of his French girlfriend!

Decoding was also made easier by knowing part of the content of the message. Loyal Nazis were always fond of closing their encrypted messages with a hearty "Heil Hitler" which of course aided the British immensely.

Re:Enigma decrypt

[Elektroschock]

It was not that easy, this is a legend. Encrypted messages were not sent as sms today and in telegraphy you don't greet the recipient but keep it very short. So probably it would be more an 'alpha' 'charly' game. And of course nobody uses the name of his girl friend because the operators could not decide the code, but were given the code at the beginning of their mission.

Btw, there are still the original machines to play with and it is probably easy to create a real replica. it's all simple mechanics. Go to the next submarine museum and figure out how she works.

And the real irony

[pjt33]

The real irony is that during the Cold War, the USSR actually used an uncrackable cipher - the one-time pad. Unfortunately, due to problems producing and distributing key material, they ended up being two-time pads, and project VENONA managed to exploit that.

I'm going to a lecture tomorrow

[Dark$ide]

There's a lecture in Basingstoke tomorrow night from someone who worked at Bletchley Park during WWII.

I'll ask the presenter what they think of this hardware replica of the Enigma.

50000 war criminals

[WoOS]

If they are war criminals, sue them. You seem to be very sure to know what 'they' have done.
If you don't have any proof .... well "in dubio pro reo" still holds.

NSA Archives

[Detritus]

There's probably a lot of material in the NSA archives on how to crack rotor machines. After World War II, many small countries were given surplus rotor machines as part of foreign/military aid packages. They weren't told that the machines could be cracked by cryptanalysts working for the major powers. Even the U.S Navy used rotor machines, such as the KL-7, into the 1980s. They were withdrawn after it was discovered that they had been thoroughly compromised by the Walker spy ring.

Re:No thank you...

[Bones3D_mac]

Thank you! Finally someone [i]gets[/i] the joke!

Of course, it gets a +5 funny when someone actually says "enema" instead of just implying it, as I had.

People can be such hacks. ;-P

Mod parent up

[HBI]

This is the best thing i've read on /. in weeks. Literally.

crypt(1) vs. crypt(3)

[ttocs_47]

At least on BSD 4.2-derived Unices (I'm a newcomer, only using *nix since around 1984 or so) such as SunOS, the file encryption command crypt(1) did indeed use an Enigma-like algorithm, while the password encryption (and the library call crypt(3)) used DES.

The enigma-like crypt was still present in SunOS 4.1.3 (circa 1990). Here is an excerpt from the man page for crypt(1) :

crypt implements a one-rotor machine designed along the lines of the German Enigma, but with a 256-element rotor.

Methods of attack on such machines are widely known, thus crypt provides minimal security. The transformation of a key into the internal settings of the machine is deliberately designed to be expensive, that is, to take a substantial fraction of a second to compute. However, if keys are restricted to (say) three lower-case letters, then encrypted files can be read by expending only a substantial fraction of five minutes of machine time.

Re:crypt(1) vs. crypt(3)

[T-Ranger]

For compleatness sake:

phoenix:jeffw:~$ uname -a
SunOS phoenix 5.6 Generic_105181-03 sun4m sparc SUNW,SPARCstation-20
phoenix:jeffw:~$ which crypt
/usr/bin/crypt

[jeffw@halifax jeffw]$ uname -a
SunOS halifax 5.9 Generic_112233-08 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-60
[jeffw@halifax jeffw]$ which crypt
/usr/bin/crypt

I never noticed that before. But knowing Sun, it doesnt supprise me. Learning this has caused me to both love and hate Sun more then I already love and hate Sun.

Excellent!

[Turismo86]

Now no one can understand what I am saying... not that they understand what I talk about anyway.

Re:Am I the only one

[Radio Shack Robot]

I know what you mean. I triple-checked the spelling when I typed it in. heh

Re: bad machine

[Anonymous Coward]

The Enigma-cracker is currently very bad.

Today, the best cryptocracker is something using the SATISFIABILITY library.

[ref: COOK (Turing2SAT), Barak, Chu-Min-Li, Henry Kautz, Bart Selman, Hantao Zhang, and many important authors].

In the searching of the hidden bits 0 and 1 of the hidden key ... the answer is there out.
open4free

Re: HA, HA, JA, HO, HO, HA

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very useful to crack

Quasi-groups, RSA, DES, 3DES, MD5, SHA1, crypt(3), Enigma's rotors, ...

this was my 2nd CS project...

[Anonymous Coward]

...for my first semester CS class. We recreated the Enigma in Scheme... 'twas quite fun.

Re:Original Messages (not quite good enough....)

[Surfing Caddis]

But if soldiers questioned the motives of their leadersBEFORE carrying out their orders, they might not execute them and the butchery of civilians for instance that hte US is conducting in Iraq nad di in Vietname. Then were would we be? Oh wait.. I think another Nazi put it best: Gilbert: 'We got around to the subject of war again, and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.' Goehring: '... But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.' Gilbert: ' There is one difference, I pointed out. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States, only Congress can declare wars.' Goehring: ' Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.' --'Nuremberg Diaries,', G.M. Gilbert, in which the author interviews Hermann Goehring

Do-It-Yourself Electronic Enema Machine??

[abandonment]

wow...and i never thought...lol

Re:Original Messages (not quite good enough....)

[beer_maker]

Let me get this straight: you are using Hermann Gohring as your source for "political insight"?! WTF, couldn't you find a better line in Pol Pot's diaries?

Gohring, Hitler & the Nazi bosses et al may have believed they knew how politics works, but they also believed (1) they could invade and defeat the Soviet Union while still fighting on the Western Front, (2) the US would NEVER get into the war, and (3) that Jews , Negroes, and Gypsies were "polluting the pure Aryan Race".

Frankly, I think I'd look a little harder at my sources if they had such a crappy track record.

Now, as to your initial thesis, that soldiers should be questioning the motives of their leaders before carrying out their orders, here's a news flash for you: They Do. The "Law of Land Warfare" has been a mandatory part of both military induction (AKA bootcamp) and military professionalization (AKA mandatory Training Time.) To be specific, shooting unarmed civilians is and has been frowned upon as (1) morally wrong, (2) illegal, and (3) economically and politically ineffective (it costs you in both bullets and cooperation.)

Do bad things still happen during armed conflict? Yes. War is Hell, as you may have heard, and people under stress can do things they later regret. Do we try to prevent needless deaths? Yes. Do we prosecute those cases we find out about? Absolutely - does the name Calley ring a bell?

Lastly, I would agree we are making a mistake in our handling of the Iraqi Situation - I think we should just pack up & leave. We accomplished the removal of Saddam, they can figure out their own destiny without further US handholding. If they go fundamentalist, so be it, it's their sovereign right to make that decision.

I have an Enigma-E - works great

[PeterCook]

Yeah - yeah - all jokes aside this is a WWII geek machine - it was easy to assemble and works great. I give the creators of this credit for the hard work they put in - they even delivered a completed one to the Bletchley Trust Director for display. On the side I have been a consultant to Bletchley Park - supporter and a personal friend of a woman who worked in the registration room at Bletchley during the war. She shared many of her photos, artifacts and stories about what it was like to work somewhere and then never being able to tell anyone what you did there until 35 years later (Secrets Act). Her parents died not knowing what she did for her country. If you haven't been there - take the train to Bletchley (from Euston station in London north about an hour & a half) next time you in the UK - 200 yards away from the station is the main gate of the complex - you will be blown away by what's there. One of the problems with the comments I have seen here is that most of the knowledge about BP from folks on this side of the Atlantic is either incomplete or misinformed. At BP they had 12 Colossus computers working by the end of the war. A replica was rebuilt in 1996 from scratch and is still working - including the unique paper tape/proximity fuse system used to enter information - read all of Tony Sale's site to understand it. At the end of the war all but one of the Colossus computers were destroyed under the British War Secrets act and the building housing them was demolished in the 1960's - all that's left is the granite front step. All blueprints and all photos but about 3 were destroyed. The last Colossus was sent to the British version of the NSA - GCHQ in Cheltenham. It was reported it was also destroyed after a few years. Americans know very little about BP or Colossus. One of the reasons why various codes were cracked was that some the Germans became lazy and started beginning the codes with familiar words, phrases, and even girlfriend's names - like putting a personal stamp on the message. Bletchley Park is in the process of creating and preserving the unique information technology history that took place there. They are a very unique treasure - you won't find them mentioned in UK travel books but I am going to change that. Hooray for the Enigma-E! - personally I was amused that this fully working encryption device (BTW not all German codes were deciphered) was sent to me and passed through US Customs with the label "Electronic Toy" on it. This device is still a useful machine and definitely not a toy.

Re:Original Messages (not quite good enough....)

[TygerFish]

Lastly, I would agree we are making a mistake in our handling of the Iraqi Situation - I think we should just pack up & leave. We accomplished the removal of Saddam, they can figure out their own destiny without further US handholding. If they go fundamentalist, so be it, it's their sovereign right to make that decision.

Thank god this has probably gone below the radar of moderation, because this opinion is not going to make me in any way popular.

There is a thing in history called, 'Realpolitik,' a German word meaning 'real politics'--'politics in the real world. In essence, it is what policymakers use to make political judgements before the ideas behind those judgements are brought into the light of day--what they are before they are sold to a congress or 'spun' to the media.

One of the reasons the Iraq war and occupation suck is that it is a policy which ignores history and sociology. It is easy to say that we should let them sort it out, but the simple fact is, now that we've gone this far, we can't do that without risking our real and imagined interests in the region.

Our interests in the region involves the absence of conflict between the countries there and their alliance with or respect for the west because we in the United States are trapped in a culture that is dependent on the overuse of energy.

We don't conserve energy. We don't protect against greenhouse gasses and the current administration has even offered a tax-credit equaling the price of the vehicle for companies which choose to buy fuel-inefficient vehicles (i,e., if you are in the right tax-bracket and own, or create a company, and have the cash, your Humvee is free courtesy of the U.S. government).

We live in a culture (and under a government) that desires to preserve for as long as possible the illusion that economies dependent upon cheap oil are indefinitely sustainable and without adverse consequences. Our national policy reflects this. With this in mind, using 9/11 as an excuse ('we were attacked'), the Administration has brought us into a war of choice to replace the Iraqi dictator. Unfortunately, this is idiotic policy because Saddam Hussein was the leader of the most modernized Islamic nations--the one with the greatest tolerance for religions other than Islam, and the one which offered the greatest freedom and opportunity for women.

As critics pointed out during the run-in to the invasion, replacing Saddam Hussein released decades religious conflict that Hussein's regime effectively suppressed.

Now that Hussein is gone, the shiite moslems are vying for power, creating the threat that they will join with Iran to increase the population and the economic strength of a known U.S. enemy, while fundamentalists from inside and outside Iraq are working to sabotage the United State's efforts to impress the Iraqi people with our benevolence and desire to create a democracy that is friendly to the west. Add to this the very real possibility of actual civil war which could spread throughout the region and you have a situation that has gone from our using diplomacy to simply keep a cork on a nasty little dictator from a distance to one where it is absolutely vital that we spend billions of dollars and hundreds of lives trying to *bring* stability to a region that already had it.

This brings us at last to question of the morality of leaving the region to its own devices. When it comes to realpolitik, leaders ignore it at their peril as they do all other aspects of reality in their decision-making. Part of the reality of the situation in Iraq is that Saddam Hussein took care of our interests and he did it for free.

More importantly, one thing that is not played up by the U.S. media is that simple fact that had Hussein ever actually abused the Iraqi people to the point where they spontaneously rose up against him, they would have won because the Iraqi people were armed during Hussein's rule a fact which is born out by at least one instance of a U.S. patrol's 'returning fire' at a wedding where fully automatic weapons were fired in the air, just as they were during Hussein's rule.

Peace be with you.

"Byte" back issues

[coyote-san]

I tossed most of my back issues years ago, but kept the earliest year because of the ads. 8" floppies costing over a kilobuck (at a time when new cars ran $4-5k), memory sold in kilobits, CPU clocks measured in single-digit megahertz....

But I need the storage space... the staff at the library will probably scratch their head when they see the issues in the donation pile.