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Happy Birthday Alan Turing! How Modern Technology Could Win WWII In 13 Minutes (digitalocean.com)
DevNull127 writes: A grateful reporter whose father-in-law liberated a concentration camp after D-Day reports on a high-tech team that "accomplished in 13 minutes what took Alan Turing years to do — and at a cost of just $7."
"In late 2017, at the Imperial War Museum in London, developers applied modern AI techniques to break the 'unbreakable' Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt their correspondences in World War II."
Two Polish co-founders of a company called Enigma Pattern decided to honor Alan Turing's ground-breaking work at Bletchley Park, where Turing had automated the testing of over 15 billion possible passwords each day by building what's considered the first modern computer. They took the problem to a modern cloud infrastructure provider, renting what one describes as "2,000 minions that do the tedious work" — specifically, crunching 41 million combinations each second — using Grimm's Fairy Tales to train an algorithm to recognize when they had found a commonly-used German word (including familiar bedtime stories like Hansel & Gretl and Rumpelstiltskin). "In the end the AI could not understand German. But it did what machine learning does best: recognize patterns."
"After 13 minutes of minion work, boom! The new Bombe had broken the code."
Turing's birthday is Saturday — and it's nice to see him being remembered so fondly.
"In late 2017, at the Imperial War Museum in London, developers applied modern AI techniques to break the 'unbreakable' Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt their correspondences in World War II."
Two Polish co-founders of a company called Enigma Pattern decided to honor Alan Turing's ground-breaking work at Bletchley Park, where Turing had automated the testing of over 15 billion possible passwords each day by building what's considered the first modern computer. They took the problem to a modern cloud infrastructure provider, renting what one describes as "2,000 minions that do the tedious work" — specifically, crunching 41 million combinations each second — using Grimm's Fairy Tales to train an algorithm to recognize when they had found a commonly-used German word (including familiar bedtime stories like Hansel & Gretl and Rumpelstiltskin). "In the end the AI could not understand German. But it did what machine learning does best: recognize patterns."
"After 13 minutes of minion work, boom! The new Bombe had broken the code."
Turing's birthday is Saturday — and it's nice to see him being remembered so fondly.
"a year" was roughly how long it took to develop the Bombe. The Bombe was an important breakthrough in that it automated a tedious step of the decryption.
Enigma decryption was done like this:
1. Cryptanalysts used various techniques to find a crib: a possible plaintext for a section of one message. Weaknesses in Enigma were exploited to find these cribs. A famous one is the fact that an Enigma can't encrypt a letter as itself, which gives an easy way to do an initial test. Operational weaknesses included the German propensity to send predictable messages like "nothing to report" and "wettervorhersage" which provided nice cribs.
2. The crib was converted (by the cryptanalyst) to a menu. The menu was basically a way to tell the Bombe what links there were between the plaintext and ciphertext.
3. The Bombe ran through all possible wheel settings to find settings that exhibited the links in the menu.
4. The Bombe produced one or more wheel settings, these were tried on the whole message. The correct settings could then be used to decrypt all messages for that radio net and that day.
From the article it looks like this "AI" uses German word lists to find cribs, then feeds those in a Bombe equivalent.
Bletchley Park's successes were certainly an important factor in the Allied victory. But those successes didn't just depend on quick decryption.
- BP was the first organization to take codebreaking to an industrial scale, and one of the first to experience information overload in a war scenario. They were drowning in radio traffic, and had to make sense of it all for the intel to be of any use.
- BP was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war. Any Allied operation that was too obviously the result of information the Allies could only have gotten by reading Enigma, would have compromised all of BP's work. The Germans would have switched to new, better coding machines and BP would have been back at square 1. So elaborate measures were taken to provide plausible explanations for how the Allies got their intel. Reconnaissance efforts were directed toward enemy troop concentrations, for example. Sometimes the Allies couldn't use their intel because no plausible explanation could be fabricated in time.
- The Germans occasionally introduced new Enigma variations (the 4-rotor naval and intelligence versions, the steckerboard, new rotors). All BP had to work out how these machines worked, was the encrypted radio messages (and on one memorable occasion, the chance to steal an actual machine from a German U-boot as it sank). It could take months to work out how new rotors were wired.
- Once the bombes were up and running, the time to get the day's settings dropped to a few hours, and it became rare for BP not to break the settings for all major networks before the day was over.