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.

Comments

Free machines for third-world nations!

[Black Parrot]

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.

Re:Free machines for third-world nations!

[wonkey_monkey]

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.

Or maybe they donated Enigma machines to other countries and kept the cracking of them a secret so they could spy on said countries.

OYJOE

[Anonymous Coward]

oyjoe evquc vthkg xukhd lnmiq xzjuq ssoui ombat rudso ymblf qaxto dzjw

Cool.

[o_ferguson]

I know a guy who worked at Bletchley Park, and he said that they could never crack the luftwafe code because it was a true OTP implimentation. The pilots were literally issued a little one-time pad before flight, with letters on a grid of co-ordinates, and then instructions sent from ground ops would simply be pairs of x/y co-ordinates so the pilots could just look at the pad and see the message out. For each new message they would tear off one page and have a new arrangement of letters.