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Enigma Machine for Sale on eBay

Posted by samzenpus on from the break-your-own-codes dept.

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?"

34 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Potential buyer by EveryNickIsTaken · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hear that the MPAA is interested in purchasing the machine - as they've heard that it has unbreakable encryption.

  2. Darn by CastrTroy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Looks like it's only the 3 gear model. If it was the four gear model, I surely would have purchased it :P.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    1. Re:Darn by Detritus · · Score: 5, Informative

      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
    2. Re:Darn by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Informative

      How many four gear models survived the war? They were installed in u-boats, which weren't noted for a long life expectancy.

      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
    3. Re:Darn by Iphtashu+Fitz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      True, but at least a half dozen of them were successfully recovered by the Allies during the war. The movie U-571 is a dramatization of one of these successes, and the credits at the end of the movie list a number of other incidents where Enigmas were captured. No idea what happened to all of these though. My bet would be that either they ended up in museums or were destroyed after the war.

    4. Re:Darn by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Funny

      You mean Cryptonomicon wasn't real?

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    5. Re:Darn by hoofie · · Score: 5, Interesting

      While your post is correct about the film being a 'dramatisation', that film was some serious fiction. The Americans weren't even in the war when the first Enigmas were captured. The first capture of note [not an Enigma machine itself but something more vital] was grabbed from U110 by Sub-Lieutenant David Balme, aboard HMS Bulldog on the 9th May 1941 who was subsequently awarded a DSC for his actions. Before leaving the submarine, he grabbed a sealed envelope that contained the hyper-secret starting positions used by the Kriegsmarine.

      This one looks like an Enigma 1 [Wermacht or Services Enigma]. They were also used by government and banks so this one could have been ex-government etc.

      The important of cracking Enigma cannot ever be overstated. There is a general agreement amongst historians that the Allies ability to read the German's encrypted traffic shaved a couple of years off the war. I would encourage our American brethren to read the book 'Enigma:The Battle for the Code' by Simon Sebag-Montefiore. Its an exceptionally good and instructive read about the whole Enigma issue.

    6. Re:Darn by piquadratCH · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The important of cracking Enigma cannot ever be overstated. There is a general agreement amongst historians that the Allies ability to read the German's encrypted traffic shaved a couple of years off the war.

      I would go as far and say that cracking Enigma prevented nuclear bombs over Europe. Nevertheless, the names of Rejewski, Turing and others have been forgotten or never known by the public. It's a shame.

    7. Re:Darn by DerekLyons · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The important of cracking Enigma cannot ever be overstated.

      Actually, it can be (and often is) overstated. The fascination with Enigma, among both the general public and the historians, often obscures (or fails to mention at all) the fact that the codebreaking effort was but one portion of the overall electronic intelligence effort. Especially in the Battle of the Atlantic where Huff-Duff and more conventional technques (like traffic analysis) yielded vast amounts of vital intelligence data.
       
      Even with decrypted ciphertext, it always took considerable analysis to break the code(s) the messages used in the text for further security. (In the Atlantic the Allies, for example, never got a break like 'AF is short of fresh water'.)
    8. Re:Darn by pegr · · Score: 3, Funny

      How many four gear models survived the war? They were installed in u-boats, which weren't noted for a long life expectancy.
       
      QKGYE SYEBD ARELM YEKHD? QTDPO STWEK YEGDT MWKOI FDYUW ARRTK HQPTY NVDQK!

  3. Instructions? by JonathanR · · Score: 3, Funny

    It comes complete with instructions (cypher-text of course) on how to win the War on Terror. Ask DVD Jon for the key.

  4. That explains it by Hair-Dog13 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, the low price must be due to the fact that you really have to have a set of two to use them......

    1. Re:That explains it by CastrTroy · · Score: 3, Funny

      Someone set us up the bombe.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:That explains it by g0dsp33d · · Score: 3, Funny

      Like the Vista install that came with my laptop?

      --
      lol: You see no door there!
    3. Re:That explains it by Garabito · · Score: 4, Funny

          *   -----> The joke

         o
        -|-   -----> You
        / \

  5. Military or commercial? by sphealey · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That looks more like a commercial machine to me. Does anyone see anything that marks it as a military version? Military equipment usually comes with manuals labeled "Machine, Cypher, Field, Mark 5.4.3.12.a" not "Enigma".

    sPh

    1. Re:Military or commercial? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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).

  6. The secret message is: by Alien+Being · · Score: 5, Funny

    d-r-i-n-k y-o-u-r o-v-a-l-t-i-n-e

  7. Concern about the price. by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 3, Funny

    Gaahhh! How do I outbid the current price of $XCCCX921 ???

  8. Re:The future by gkhan1 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yeah, that's the reason we shouldn't have driven Alan Turing to suicide.

  9. unimpressed by CubicleView · · Score: 5, Funny

    TFA is nothing more than an enigma wrapped in an ebay auction wrapped in a Slashdot article.

  10. How secure is Enigma these days? by hcdejong · · Score: 5, Interesting

    this page claims modern computers can crack an Enigma message in "a few minutes".
    But a recent effort to crack some M4 messages using distributed computing estimated some 10,000 PC-hours to break a message.

    1. Re:How secure is Enigma these days? by Ecuador · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The Enigma comes in different designs. The easily crackable "in a few minutes" has three rotors. The messages the project M4 uses were encrypted with the much tougher to break 4 rotor design (hence the M4 name of the project).

      --
      Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
    2. Re:How secure is Enigma these days? by tokul · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Original Bombe was used to break three rotor commercial enigma. M4 Project is trying to break four rotor Kriegsmarine Enigma messages. Read the ones that are broken. Short messages, non-english language, lots of short cuts, only some words are from dictionary. Even if you broke one, you still have to decypher what von Looks wants to say in his message.

      Kriegsmarine has some security rules for Enigma transmissions. U-boat commanders usually followed them.

    3. Re:How secure is Enigma these days? by cryptoguy · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  11. Re:Fantastic by gkhan1 · · Score: 3, Funny

    So, nothing new?

  12. The Enigmas were not the only things destroyed by Bearhouse · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:The Enigmas were not the only things destroyed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's an unfortunately common procedure. When the production of SR-71s was halted all the designs and equipment was destroyed so new ones couldn't be built. This probably set aerospace, metallurgy and who knows what else back for at least as much.

  13. What's remarkable by fishthegeek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    to me is not the Enigma machine itself, but the Allied response to it and other Axis crypto systems. If you haven't had the chance yet you should read up on the folks at Bletchley Park, it's one of the most fascinating programs of WW2. Without a doubt the people that worked there contributed as much to the effort as any other single organization and probably shortened the war considerably.

    There is a pretty good artile on Wikipedia

    --
    load "$",8,1
  14. Re:Question by Mr.+Moose · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes. All VI commands are Enigma encrypted.

  15. See also (in German): by OmniGeek · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."
  16. Godwin and eBay by Speare · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not to invoke Godwin's Law here, but I thought that eBay refused auctions of WWII Nazi German wartime memorabilia? Is it just those items that bear the symbol of the Third Reich? It's a cool object to geek sensibilities. I would say that today, it symbolizes a particularly crafty bit of code-busting on the part of the Allies against Nazi Germany, even moreso than the crafty bit of code-creating clock-engineering work on the part of the Germans. But it's still Nazi memorabilia on some level, which I thought was against eBay rules.

    --
    [ .sig file not found ]
    1. Re:Godwin and eBay by J_Omega · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm surprised that the article itself didn't invoke Godwin's Law!

      AFAIK*, there were both military and civilian versions of Enigma. The eBay piece doesn't appear to be military (no iron cross, no mil. ID, etc.,) so I'm going to assume that this was not a true "Nazi" piece. It was probably used in high-finance or something similar. So, in theory, this would be similar to selling an early model Volkswagen that was built for the general public.

      * IANA Historian/Nazi Enthusiast/Cryptogeek

  17. Hands on display at NSA Museum, Ft. Meade by Stainless_Steel_Mous · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Last time I was there, you could play with one of these at the National Cryptoglogic Museum near Ft. Meade in Maryland, URL: http://www.nsa.gov/museum/

    THis place is _really_ worth a visit. The staff are all retired NSA staff and are glad to talk to you about the exhibits (now that the equipment is declassified!) They have an excellent exhibit on Cold War era supercomputers, with a Cray and a Connection Machine CM-5 on display.