Enigma-Cracking Bombe Recreated

toxcspdrmn writes "Volunteers at Bletchley Park have recreated a working replica of the electromechanical bombe used to crack the Germans' Enigma encryption. The bombe was designed by Polish cryptologists and refined by Alan Turing and colleagues at Bletchley Park. The replica joins a recreated electronic Colossus — generally considered the first electronic computer. Impressive work when you consider that Winston Churchill ordered the originals to be completely destroyed at the end of WWII."

Comments

Deserved honour, indeed.

[alexwcovington]

It's truly a testiment to the brilliance of these people, that they were able to do so much with so little in the way of computing power. It's a shame that Alan Turing met such an unfortunate fate, with all he did for modern computing.

Re:Deserved honour, indeed.

[joe 155]

I too share your admiration of the fantastic work which was done there.

One of the worst things Churchil did was not allowing the continuation of this project and continual research in the field. As an English man and a Conservative I feel thats been one of our worst own goals... Silicon Vally could have been in Kent (or, even better, Grimsby!). But then again we did something similar to Babage and his difference engine.

Still, it's nice to see what some of the greatest people in the world at the time did in their field, even if it does bring up old regrets...

Re:Deserved honour, indeed.

[JohnGrahamCumming]

Turing's death is a warning about the dangers of discriminating against people because they are different.

For all values of 'different'.

John.

Re:Deserved honour, indeed.

[Keebler71]

Indeed...

Alan Turing's colleague Jack Good, however, said on the same television programme that if the security authorities had known about Alan Turing's homosexuality from the beginning, 'we might have lost the war.'

Re:Deserved honour, indeed.

[2sheds]

> One of the worst things Churchil did was not allowing the continuation of this project

Well, he did allow continuation, it's just that it was under ultratight security in a department that would become today's GCHQ (Government Communications HQ - our equivalent of the NSA). The reason for that security is obvious; he wanted Britain to keep the competitive advantage of being able to spy on friends and allies without anyone being aware of that ability. Go and read up on the history of British SIGINT during the post war years if you're interested. There's a fair bit on Wikipedia about GCHQ and it's precedessor, the Government Code and Cipher School (Bletchley Park to you and me).

Imagine..

[Yetihehe]

Imagine beowulf cluster of these. It would be colossus!

Marian Rejewski

[Ignignot]

How on earth can you mention this device without saying Rejewski's name? He is the one that originally cracked the enigma code, and did all of the hard cryptanalysis long before those guys in the UK got anywhere. He barely gets a footnote in history, while the machines that were built get all of the credit. Ultimately they were just collections of vaccuum tubes - it was Rejewski that gave them a purpose. Turing was brilliant of course and should be revered, but not alone.

Re:Marian Rejewski

[Mahy]

Turing didn't just wire the thing up: He came up with the approach that allowed them to deal with the plug board.

It is even less well known that Turing's Bombes were unable to solve the 4-wheel Naval Enigma. The 4-wheel Naval Enigma was actually solved by engineers working for NCR in Dayton Ohio, led by Joe Desch. Their contributions were classified until the mid-90s, and so were not well known. See:

1) http://www.daytoncodebreakers.com/
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Desch

Re:Marian Rejewski

[igb]

No one with half an understanding underestimates Rejewski's contributions, but your article is somewhat wide of the mark. Firstly, Rejewski's work focussed on the attacks on the double-encipherment of the message setting in the indicators prior to about 1940. By use of the bomba he was able to produce tables of `males' and `females' which indicated the circumstances under which the double-encipherment of the indicator offered a route into the message settings. Rejewski's method didn't require any knowledge of the plain text, but did crucially depend on the structure of the indicators. His work was replicated in the UK in the construction of Jeffries Sheets.

However, although Turing/Welchman's bombe paid explicit homage to the Polish work in the choice of name, its task was fundamentally different. The bombe provided a means to look for message settings based on the cipher text and conjectured plain text. Its weakness was the requirement for plain text, which was a massive task to obtain through traffic analysis of sterotyped messages, `kisses' with broken systems such as the Dockyard Key, weather reports transmitted in other cipher systems and so on. Its strength was that it was independent of the indicator system, which was one of the easier things to change in the Enigma system.

The Polish contribution lay in the machines themselves, the analysis of the indicator systems and the bomba (bomby? spelling may be wrong): together they showed other people that Enigma could be attacked, and provided a plentiful supply of cribs. Had the Poles not succeeded, it's unlikely that the British could have got the resources for their work. But to claim that the Polish work was the basis for the Bletchley work subsequent to the changes in the indicator system is not right.

And, if we're being picky, there might have been the odd vacumn tube in the implementation of the diagonal board's ``all on or none on'' algorithm. But bombes were essentially mechanical devices. The four-rotor ones must have been amazing to be near...

ian

Re:Marian Rejewski

[Ilex]

Actually there is a memorial to the polish cryptologists at Bletchley Park so their contribution has been recognized.

It was actually Marian Rejewski who designed the Cryptologic bomb. Bomba being the polish word for Bomb.

Turing developed the Electro-Mechanical Bomb which was capable of cracking the more sophisticated versions of the Enigma code.

It's well worth taking a trip to Bletchley Park if you get the opportunity.
It's more than just code breaking. It covers the whole history of computing.

Oh no!

[cold fjord]

Somebody set up us the bombe!

Re:Why?

[igb]

I'm not sure it's entirely true, anyway. The claim's always made that the reason the British didn't reveal that they'd broken Enigma (in the way in which the Americans rapidly documented the breaks into Red and Purple as soon as the war was over) was that the British were selling Enigma to misguided European powers, advertising it as the German's finest, without revealing they'd broken into it. For this story to make sense, the British would have to have retained the ability to break into Enigma.

It's always rumoured that Collossi were in service at Cheltenham into the sixties, attacking various Fish-style machine baudot-code ciphers. It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that a bombe or two were kept as well: with the use of the diagonal board, they were probably faster than an emulation in a computer would have been.

ian

Internal evidence that this story is false

[Flying pig]

(1) NO MOD official would ever applaud anything done by British scientists/engineers. And (2) one of AMT's greatest attributes was his willingness to transcend the mathematician/scientist/engineer divide.

The actual approach to technology of the MOD is this:
Ignore British invention for 20 years or so
Buy it when it is produced in the US
Claim that British technology is inadequate and we must always follow the Americans.

And if you think I'm bitter about the Cocks encryption method (RSA), or the entire postwar history of British technology - yes, I am.

Pictures hard to come by

[OakDragon]

Still, I found some more.

A true shame is the way Bletchley Park is treated

[fantomas]

A true shame is the way the Bletchley Park Museum is treated by the UK government and heritage authorities - they got turned down from national heritage funding and the whole place is operating on a shoe string. There are great volunteers (some of whom worked there in the war) who will take you on guided tours. It's really an amazing place to visit. Go there!

But they need financial help to keep the place running. Parts of the place really need financial investment - the Huts where the code breaking happened are barely standing. They've had to sell off some of the land around the house to developers (who are building a housing estate) to pay for the upkeep. Some of the volunteers were going round interviewing people who'd worked there during the war, they were so short of money that once they'd transcribed the interviews, they'd tape over the recordings and use the same tape again in the next interview to save money on buying new audio tapes.

If you think the work carried out at Bletchley Park during the war was valuable, or fascinating, contribute to keeping the place running as a museum. Visit the place! Buy some cool stuff from the shop! send them a donation! Please.