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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."
If you're not going to do the real thing, why not just make a software replica?
I wonder if there is anywhere to get original Nazi Enigma messages to decode.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Here's my Electronic Enigma Machine.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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...
Gnuyen
I looked at the site and the manuals arent online. I there any information abt how the enigma coding actually work ????
Yeah, right.
I'll drop one off at Bletchley on the way to picking up my Gray's Sports Almanac.
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.
I thought this was kinda cool, so I looked around for a java applet and found one: Its pretty cool.
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...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.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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.
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.
...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)
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...
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
I always thought it would be cool to make an Enigma from LEGO.
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.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the war room." -President Muffley "Dr. Strangelove"
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.
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 ;-)
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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"...)
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.
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"Yeah. It smells, too..."
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.
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.
Drink more Ovaltine.
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...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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
You don't need a lab to make mud.
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.
My rights don't need management.
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.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
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.