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Enigma Machine for Sale on eBay
RagingMaxx writes "An Italian antiques dealer has recently put to auction a mint condition, fully operational Enigma machine on eBay. The machine, dated circa 1938, will be sold to the highest bidder in just over a week, but after 30 hours of bidding the price has already surpassed $12,000 US. For those of you who can't afford the real thing, why not make your own?"
How many four gear models survived the war? They were installed in u-boats, which weren't noted for a long life expectancy.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Try one of the 359 distros. See: http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/ 2007/07/too_many_linux.html
:)))
It has the plug board, which means it was the military, not the weaker commercial, Enigma. And, there were no 4 gear models until the 40's.
When thinking of answers to questions like that I find it impossible to separate cryptomonicon from reality.
As usual, wikipedia has some answers
http://michaelsmith.id.au
There are plenty if you Google "Enigma Emulator" or "Enigma Simulator"/"Enigma simulation"
i gma_j.html
http://homepages.tesco.net/~andycarlson/enigma/en
If you want to build something mechanical try a remote control aircraft. Much more fun.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
In the interests of 'National Security', the British Govt. broke up the team that broke the Enigma codes, and 'classified' or destroyed the equipment that they had imagined, designed AND built to help. Thereby setting back the UK IT industry by - oh, let's say 10 years, IMHO.
Not gonna Karma-whore by posting a zillion Wikiped links, but it's all there if you're interested and don't know the story. Worth a read, newbies, since a lot of what you now take for granted was developed by these folks.
That is not a Wehrmacht "symbol", but the coat of arms of the Third Reich, which in turn is a perverted version of its "predecessor" from the German Empire.
The Wehrmacht symbol, by the way, is a stylized Iron Cross, which is also the current emblem of German armed forces (and has been since the German Empire).
In theory there were a astronomically large number of possible combinations (3 x 10^114) of rotor wirings, pluggable wirings, and rotor positions in a three-rotor Enigma machine. That key space is incredibly far beyond the capabilities of modern computers to search. However, in reality there were only three rotors implemented at first (later there were five, from which three were chosen for each day). The allies knew the wiring of the three rotors before the war began, and deduced the other two. So instead of having to try all the theoretical combinations of rotors, they only had to try the combinations of the ones that actually were implemented.
The subs had a four-rotor machine, but the operators made a fatal mistake. In order for messages to be read on three-rotor machines, an operator encrypted the same message twice--once with three rotors and once with four. That gave the codebreakers the information they needed to deduce the fourth rotor. They built a machine for breaking the Enigma codes which, given what they knew about the rotors, they could break them quickly enough to be extremely useful in the war.
Also a German U-boat was captured, along with a code book showing the rotor positions for the next few months. With that information they learned enough about the four rotor system to be able to break those messages also.
A *very* interesting account of the Enigma's history from a postwar Polish perspective, translated in East Germany (I got my copy from the gift shop at the Rundfunkmuseum in Nuremberg). This is a translation from the Polish original.
German Translation: "Im Banne Der Enigma" (Under The Spell Of The Enigma)
Original title: "W krgu Enigmy", published in Warsaw in 1979
Author: Wladyslaw Kozaczuk
Translation published by: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik
(translator's name not listed)
ISBN 3-327-00423-4
In addition to its rather interesting political perspective, the book has an extremely detailed account of the Polish Intelligence Service's work on Enigma, including material I'd not seen in most of the more accessible Western literature on Enigma. In essence, the Polish crypto boffins had Enigma cracked (including automated cracking machines) before the war even started, but lacked the resources to scale up their efforts as the machines were upgraded (addition of the plugboard and new rotors); that, and the German occupation of Poland and later France, led them to share their findings with Britain, and the history most folks hear about.
BTW, WRT the "Enigma-E" electronic Enigma machine, I highly recommend it. I still get a kick out of decrypting messages with the one I built (in its nifty wooden case). Well worth the cost for those who've gotten the "Enigma virus".
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
You're forgetting that an Enigma machine couldn't encrypt a letter to itself, so basically not all combinations of possible keys and wirings were possible. This made it easier for them to feed the bombe since they could reduce (manually) the number of possible combinations.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Bletchley Park not only has Enigma machines, they have recently completed a replica Bombe, and they're working on a replica Colossus.
As of this posting, it's gone, presumably for this reason.