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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
Yeah, right.
I'll drop one off at Bletchley on the way to picking up my Gray's Sports Almanac.
This page explains Enigma fairly well.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
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.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I wonder if the real Nazi Enigma machines also had Java.lang.NullPointerException errors...
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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?
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.
There is some sort of description written by Turing himself
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 XMESGWSGRQYOZL LLLLL
* [plain] LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
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"
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.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
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.
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