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Help Break Original Enigma Messages
Stereo writes "The Enigma Machine was cracked in Poland in 1932, but three messages remain unbroken, despite having been intercepted in the North Atlantic in 1942. The M4 Project, named after the four rotor Enigma M4 used for encryption, is a distributed computing effort to break them. One message has already been deciphered successfully!"
There are more than just those three message still unbroken. Those were just three that were selected for this project.
Are they sure they're not just bad data? Wouldn't it be a good idea to send crap through the lines every so often to throw people off the trail?
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Here's a site where you can order a parts kit to build you own Enigma Machine.
So what if it took 60 years to crack, those subs are sitting ducks now! Good encryption my ass..
MABASPLOOM!
Here's a Java Enigma Simulator.
If it wasn't for the Enigma machine it is unlikely computers would be as advanced as they are today since cracking the enigma code was THE reason computer development really got started with the Mark I in WWII.
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
The full Enigma code is extremely difficult to break. The machine used by Alan Turing (Colossus) was massively parallel and highly optimized for the task - so much so that it is actually able to compute something like ten times as many keys per second as a modern Pentium 4 using the same algorithm. Not bad, for a machine of that era.
The Enigma suffered from numerous weaknesses - almost all of them operator error. The encryption mechanism itself was damn good and, if used correctly each time, every time, it would have been horribly difficult for the Bletchley Park team to break.
The one event that turned Enigma transparent was the re-transmission of a message without the cogs being randomized first. Because a machine had already been recovered, Turing knew what the cogs were, just not where they should be in relation to each other. By having the same message sent twice without change and without a prior reset, it was possible to overlay the two messages and thereby infer virtually everything else.
This only allows you to crack messages which use the same prng for initialization and identical cogs. Since the cogs were designed to be swappable, non-standard configurations would have been possible. These would not have been crackable - and would likely not be crackable today, if non-standard enough. (The number of arrangements you would need to test increases with the factorial of the number of ways the cogs could be designed, as well as the factorial of the number of ways the cogs could be inserted into the machine.)
The possibility exists that certain units may have used non-standard Enigma codes, but if that is the case, those codes will NOT be broken by this effort. The groups that spirited high-ranking Germans to South America and other "secure" locations must have had a communication system that the Allies had not yet deciphered, as they must have been able to operate over extremely large distances very quickly, making the use of radio a certainty.
It is also likely that some units within the German military adopted their own "extra secure" practices when using the Enigma system internally. These may or may not be crackable, depending on how paranoid the commanders were.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Too busy reading your email :D
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Of course, in WW2, it was the misuse of enigma that made it particularily easy to break --- It might only take one weather report to learn the daily subkey. Had Enigma been properly used, it would probably have been nearly unbreakable with WW2 era technology.
Actualy, if the Poles hadn't been REALLY proactive about truing to break the German Enigma we (the Allies) would have been really fucked. The French had access to Enigma plans but felt that it was impopssible to crack Enigma so they handed all their data to the Poleish intelligence service (Burio Szyfrow)and siad good luck.. Marian Rejewski of the Burio developed an attack on Enigma (absolutely brilliant!!) that actually suceeded in cracking the cipher. The Poles were decrypting German messages on a daily basis until 1938, when the Germans increased the number of scramblers to 5 so that any 3 were available for encryption and also added new plugboards. When Poland was attacked by the Germans the Poles called in the British and gave them spare Enigma replicas they had built, blueprints, and cracking strategies. They were sent to England in diplomatic pouches via Paris. smuggled across the Channel by a French playwrite and his actress wife, so as not to be detected by Geman spies at the Channel ports. Laugh all you want to, but the Poles made it possible to win World War II.
The parent poster is correct: a properly used Enigma machine is effectively unbreakable with the technology of the day and, for that matter, the technology of the next few decades too.
The majority of the users of the Enigma machine were not using it properly and so left cracks for BP to exploit. All this is well documented by people who do know a great deal about cryptographic systems. Some of them worked for BP and have in-depth first hand knowledge of what they write about.
Even today's technology, that in the open literature anyway, still has real difficulties breaking Naval Enigma without the weaknesses introduced by the German users of the system. Read the site carefully and you will discover that important amounts of key material are already known, thereby greatly reducing the amount of computation required to find the rest of the key. And even with this assistance, approximately a cpu year is needed to break the encryption.
All this strongly suggests that Naval Enigma isn't a bad cryptosystem and certainly a good one for the day. There have been many much worse ones fielded in recent years.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
Doesn't the DMCA make it illegal to make tools for breaking encryption or even to discuss how encryption may be broken? Aren't those among us who are americans all conspiring to break federal law by attempting or discussing the possibility of attempting to break these enigma messages?
You're all terrorists. Off to Guantanamo with you.
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
I've heard from an anonymous source in the US intelligence community that British Intelligence has informed the White House that the newly decrypted enigma messages contains information regarding Irak WMD locations, and clear indication of the Saddam-Osama link...
The second message has now been cracked and it contained three interesting bits of 'technology history'...
It warned other units that a local garage mechanic had offered to 'improve' their Enigma machine to make it run faster, but after he left they discovered he'd inserted a small additional module which meant that whatever was transmitted, there was an extra last line which read "Come to Fritz's autos for a great deal on used Volkswagens". The cracked message told all other users only to visit trusted garages and not accept any offers of performance upgrades because such offers were the work of 'trojan enemy conspirators that operated like an unwanted virus in the body of our glorious Fatherland'.
There were also complaints of many false messages being received that decoded into offers to supply the German solders with 'processed meat rations' captured from allied troops - the cracked message warned Enigma users to ignore the flood of 'unwanted messages about spam that deflect focus from our vital war efforts' and not to reply as this only confirmed that the messages were being received, which guaranteed even more 'spam messages'.
The final bit of the decoded message related to trials with a new rotor wiring system produced by a local engineer. Apparently, the system promised to make the Enigma machines easier to use, but the coloured insulation on the wiring was rubbing away, (presumably an interaction between the synthetic dyes being used with early, less stable plastics), exposing the conductors and causing the whole machine to short circuit and stop working ('die' as the message coldly put it). The cracked message warned other users to check their rotors to see whether they had any of the 'brightly coloured experimental wiring' and if so, to stop using them and return the rotors to 'Wilhelm Gatz' if they identified the so-called 'blue screening of death'.
AT&ROFLMAO
ian
Dear Sir,
RESPECTFULLY REQUESTING YOUR ASSISTANCE IN EXTREME CONFIDENCE
I am certain this message comes as a suprise to you since you do not know me. I have obtained your name from French Resistance fighters as one that can be trusted with my confidence.
Two months ago, my father was kidnapped and murdered by the Nazi SS. I have need to transfer the sum of US$25,000,000 (twenty-five million) from an account in Credit Lyonnais in France to an account outside of German territory, of which your payment shall be 30% if you agree to our proposal...
But why is the rum gone?