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For £70,000, You Might Be Able to Own an Enigma
In 2007, we mentioned the eBay sale of an Enigma machine; now, The Guardian reports that another one is to be auctioned off next week, with an expected selling price of about £70,000 (at this writing, that's about $108,000). According to the article, "The machine being offered for sale, which dates from 1943 and currently belongs to a European museum, will go under the hammer at Sotheby's in London on Tuesday."
The new owner may have need of a restoration manual and some reproduction batteries.
apparently so everyone would think we won by valor rather than by cheating.
Not the case. They did not want the Germans to know that they had cracked it. That would trigger a German redesign and the Allies would lose a critical advantage ( i.e. many more lives ) .
"third-world"?
In the late 40s and 50s, the term did not exist, such countries were colonial possessions and of course, the UK was in the process of first suppressing native uprisings and then transitioning the colony to full independence. It was at this point the country was gifted with Enigma machines to enable secure communications between the newly independent country and the UK. Of course, the fact that other encrypted communications could be read with relative ease was a mere bonus!
Decryption of Enigma intercepts was an art initially known only to the UK and the US and, via sneaking little gobshites, the USSR. a state of play that probably continued until the late 50s. The "donated" machines probably went out of use as "advisors" from ideological opponents entered the affected countries.
http://www.sothebys.com/en/auc...
I wish you good bidding!
I read recently that the Allies made a policy of not telling about the decryption until long after the war, apparently so everyone would think we won by valor rather than by cheating. But what's (perversely) funny is that the UK rounded up as many machines as they could and "donated" them to third- world countries so that they, too, could enjoy the benefits of strong encryption.
No. The reason why the allies kept extremely mum about cracking the enigma was simply because they had learned the hard way that this was the right thing to do.
It goes back to the first world war when the British "Room 40" cracked German naval codes. The German navy knew nothing of this until W. Churchill published a history of the war where he "spilled the beans" about it. The German Navy and army where shocked when they learned how their crypto had been compromised and decided to strengthen their crypto to previously unheard levels. That is the reason why they bought and deployed the Enigma machines.
The Enigma was practically unbreakable at the time if used correctly, so it was by a thin margin that the Allies where able to decrypt Enigma messages. So they felt it was absolutely vital reveal nothing about their successes after the war, so future potential enemies didn't improved their crypto and crypto-procedures even more.