by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday February 26 2006, @02:22AM (#14803024)
One of the main reasons the Enigma crypts were breakable with 1940's technology is that the Germans did _not_ do useful things like that. They re-used keys, left cribs in the messages, etc.
Basically, they put too much faith in the encryption technology, and didn't put enough effort into securing the rest of the process. It's not unusual, many of today's systems have similar issues.
The comments in Bruce Schneier's blog [schneier.com] list some more things that went wrong in the Enigma process.
Since the crib relied on the Enigma's inability to encode a letter to itself, the received message must have consisted entirely of the letter L.
To be precise, the message was slightly more likely to have consisted entirely of the letter L. There's no mathematical guarantee that it would contain all Ls, but a sufficiently long ciphertext message with no Ls in the output would've indicated that, with high probability, there were an unusually large number of Ls in the input. Without knowing the actual story, I'd guess that the message probably wasn't all that long, and the math would probably predict only a few more Ls than normal... but that was enough of a hint that when combined with a knowledge of human behavior gave the cryptanalysts reason to assume it was all Ls and see if they could find key settings that would produce the ciphertext from that input.
Even at the height of Bletchley Park's codebreaking efficiency, nearly every day's break came down to some clever guess of that sort... "What if we tried this?". I imagine the "all Ls" scenario was one of the easier guesses. In order to make it more certain, the codebreakers even asked the front-line forces to do apparently bizarre things, just so they'd have a keyword they could look for in the subsequent reports.
Correct, a really good crypto system would be continuously transmitting a constant stream of jibberish and would have a preshared library of start and stop keywords to allow good data to be picked out by automatic means. This would allow a strong cryptographic system to also be resistant to traffic analysis. However the German enigma setup was anything but good.
The Germans were over-confident to the point of incompetence with their encryption. The British certainly didn't attempt to change this, and ULTRA [wikipedia.org] was only declassified in 1974, and it's likely as not that the Germans still thought their ciphers invincible at the end of the war.
Please tell me you're joking? properly implemented encryption? It was terrible, most likely MMaestro is right, there was no simply pressing need to decrypt them. If you want to know why the encryption wasn't properly implemented, I'd recommend ULTRA [wikipedia.org], or The Code Book by Simon Singh.
Okay, is this just one big conspiracy or not? I have *NEVER* had a Coral Cache link work. Not once.
You said it. I'm glad I'm not the only one.
It looks to me like Corel Cache can be Slashdotted as well. Indeed, the only time I ever find that Corel Cache helps me to read a story that/. links to is when someone submits the Corel Cache link, and I can then go to the original story that is supposed to be cached, because the rest of/. is hammering Corel Cache instead.
Why are there still these 3 messages that are unbroken? None of TFA seems to talk about this.
Even though it is interesting to note that it's estimated to take 1-10 days of 100 celerons 24/7 to crack a ciphertext of 180 letters long. And that's with computers that are 60 years ahead of the technology that the enigma was made from.
If it wasn't for the Enigma machine it is unlikely computers would be as advanced as they are today since cracking the enigma code was THE reason computer development really got started with the Mark I in WWII.
If it wasn't for the Enigma machine it is unlikely computers would be as advanced as they are today since cracking the enigma code was THE reason computer development really got started with the Mark I in WWII.
This is just not true. Enigma was broken using "bombes" which were not computers by any reasonable definition of the term. A bombe was simply an electromechanical device that tested each possible rotor setting. Colossus, OTOH, considered by some to be the first programmable digital computer, was
Although Colossus was classified, a lot of the people who worked on it went on to become the initial wave of computer builders in UK universities after the war. It's also reputed that at least one Colossus survived at Cheltenham into the 1970s, presumably working on multi-wheel stream ciphers.
Enigma wasn't cracked because of weaknesses in the algorithm(although those do exist), it was broken because of the German's sloppy cryptography practices and the fact that the allies found out what process they were using to determine their keys.
If a cop is wearing body armor, it doesn't mean that he can walk out into a torrent of incoming bullets. Chances are that one of those bullets will find a weakness in his armor, or simply strike him in a place where he's not protected. Similar principle here.
The parent poster is correct: a properly used Enigma machine is effectively unbreakable with the technology of the day and, for that matter, the technology of the next few decades too.
The majority of the users of the Enigma machine were not using it properly and so left cracks for BP to exploit. All this is well documented by people who do know a great deal about cryptographic systems. Some of them worked for BP and have in-depth first hand knowledge of what they write about.
The Enigma code was broken only in the trivial sense that it was possible to brute-force decrypt the messages, once the algorithm, prng and seed value were known. It was not "broken" in the purist sense of the term, in that there is no shorter method of cracking the messages other than by brute-force.
The full Enigma code is extremely difficult to break. The machine used by Alan Turing (Colossus) was massively parallel and highly optimized for the task - so much so that it is actually able to compute something like ten times as many keys per second as a modern Pentium 4 using the same algorithm. Not bad, for a machine of that era.
The Enigma suffered from numerous weaknesses - almost all of them operator error. The encryption mechanism itself was damn good and, if used correctly each time, every time, it would have been horribly difficult for the Bletchley Park team to break.
The one event that turned Enigma transparent was the re-transmission of a message without the cogs being randomized first. Because a machine had already been recovered, Turing knew what the cogs were, just not where they should be in relation to each other. By having the same message sent twice without change and without a prior reset, it was possible to overlay the two messages and thereby infer virtually everything else.
This only allows you to crack messages which use the same prng for initialization and identical cogs. Since the cogs were designed to be swappable, non-standard configurations would have been possible. These would not have been crackable - and would likely not be crackable today, if non-standard enough. (The number of arrangements you would need to test increases with the factorial of the number of ways the cogs could be designed, as well as the factorial of the number of ways the cogs could be inserted into the machine.)
The possibility exists that certain units may have used non-standard Enigma codes, but if that is the case, those codes will NOT be broken by this effort. The groups that spirited high-ranking Germans to South America and other "secure" locations must have had a communication system that the Allies had not yet deciphered, as they must have been able to operate over extremely large distances very quickly, making the use of radio a certainty.
It is also likely that some units within the German military adopted their own "extra secure" practices when using the Enigma system internally. These may or may not be crackable, depending on how paranoid the commanders were.
Colossus had nothing to do with cryptanalysis of any Engima variant.
The Colossus machines were used to help break the more advanced Baudot code teleprinter systems used for communications between German command posts - particularly the system known to the Allies as 'TUNNY'
Enigma has a fatal flaw: No letter could be encyphered to itself. This is an artifact of the 'reflector disc' at the end this means that a known plaintext, or crib, can be ruled out for a particular offset, if any letter of it matches a letter in the cyphertext. This, combined with message statistics, allows for powerful cryptographic techniques to be used. [fortunecity.com] These techniques were unavailable in WW2, but they exploit fundamental weaknesses in the design.
Of course, in WW2, it was the misuse of enigma that made it particularily easy to break --- It might only take one weather report to learn the daily subkey. Had Enigma been properly used, it would probably have been nearly unbreakable with WW2 era technology.
Of course, in WW2, it was the misuse of enigma that made it particularily easy to break --- It might only take one weather report to learn the daily subkey. Had Enigma been properly used, it would probably have been nearly unbreakable with WW2 era technology.
One tactic they used was 'Gardening' where they sent out bombers to mine a particular
sea area, then sit back and wait for standard message reporting the new minefield
While it is true what you say, I will point out that "enigma" messages originated from a lot of different networks, all with their own codebooks, eg. Luftwaffe (airforce), Abwher (intelligence), and Hehr (army) messages etc, where all encoded with different keys. These different networks where further segmented into theater of operations, meaning that breaking Hehr enigma messages from North Africa, would not yield the key for reading Hehr messages originating from France. Further more, all keys would changed daily, meaning that the British would have to start all over every day.
So getting the daily subkey from a bungled weather report, would only help the British to read messages from a particular branch, in a limited area, for a period of just 24 hours.
Have you got a reference for that "10 times faster than a p4" quote? I saw that and was impressed, but I looked colossus up on wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and apparently colossus used 1500 valves. A valve does the same thing as a transistor, and I find it extremely hard to believe that 1500 transistors, no matter how cunninly arranged to execute a single algorithm, could outperform 55 [wikipedia.org] million transistors.
And I also doubt if they were switching several thousand million times a second. Yes, I know, many of those transistors are
"The Enigma Machine was cracked in Poland in 1932,"
I read that and burst out laughing immediately thinking of three Polish soldiers running with the Enigma machine backwards and falling over and cracking the case.
Actualy, if the Poles hadn't been REALLY proactive about truing to break the German Enigma we (the Allies) would have been really fucked. The French had access to Enigma plans but felt that it was impopssible to crack Enigma so they handed all their data to the Poleish intelligence service (Burio Szyfrow)and siad good luck.. Marian Rejewski of the Burio developed an attack on Enigma (absolutely brilliant!!) that actually suceeded in cracking the cipher. The Poles were decrypting German messages on a daily basis until 1938, when the Germans increased the number of scramblers to 5 so that any 3 were available for encryption and also added new plugboards. When Poland was attacked by the Germans the Poles called in the British and gave them spare Enigma replicas they had built, blueprints, and cracking strategies. They were sent to England in diplomatic pouches via Paris. smuggled across the Channel by a French playwrite and his actress wife, so as not to be detected by Geman spies at the Channel ports. Laugh all you want to, but the Poles made it possible to win World War II.
Cool, I'm re-reading Cryptonomicon and this goes right along with that. I like how Neal Stephenson's books merge so well into real science and history. The only trick is in remembering which is true and which is fiction.:)
After putting a Beowulf cluster to work, I've deciphered the remaining two unsolved Enigma messages. It turns out that one is a reply to the other. Of course, one can never be sure whether a decryption is correct, but the perfect German in the messages convinces me that I've got them right, as you can see:
"Sieg Heil! Zis is U-571. Ze Amerikan destroyer is pwning us! After zat last depth charge, all our blinkenlights are flashing crazily! What do we do?"
"Achtung! Achtung! Brest here. Unfortunately, ze RAF Bomber Command pwn3d us last night and ze submarine pens are kaput, so you cannot return from your tour early. Remember, Kapitan, what happens to schweinhunds zat are cowards; zhey get sent to the Russian Front! Follow the example of your Luftwaffe friend Colonel Klink and watch out, or you will be given ze boot from Das Boot!"
Doesn't the DMCA make it illegal to make tools for breaking encryption or even to discuss how encryption may be broken? Aren't those among us who are americans all conspiring to break federal law by attempting or discussing the possibility of attempting to break these enigma messages?
You're all terrorists. Off to Guantanamo with you.
Doesn't the DMCA make it illegal to make tools for breaking encryption or even to discuss how encryption may be broken?
No. You're letting them control you because they always use the acronym.
It is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It is first, foremost, and only a copyright act.
The Enigma messages aren't copyrighted in any real sense (copyrights that belonged to the Nazi Party went to interesting places - at one point they were public-domained by an Allied government as "spoils of war"), and moreover t
I've heard from an anonymous source in the US intelligence community that British Intelligence has informed the White House that the newly decrypted enigma messages contains information regarding Irak WMD locations, and clear indication of the Saddam-Osama link...
The second message has now been cracked and it contained three interesting bits of 'technology history'...
It warned other units that a local garage mechanic had offered to 'improve' their Enigma machine to make it run faster, but after he left they discovered he'd inserted a small additional module which meant that whatever was transmitted, there was an extra last line which read "Come to Fritz's autos for a great deal on used Volkswagens". The cracked message told all other users only to visit trusted garages and not accept any offers of performance upgrades because such offers were the work of 'trojan enemy conspirators that operated like an unwanted virus in the body of our glorious Fatherland'.
There were also complaints of many false messages being received that decoded into offers to supply the German solders with 'processed meat rations' captured from allied troops - the cracked message warned Enigma users to ignore the flood of 'unwanted messages about spam that deflect focus from our vital war efforts' and not to reply as this only confirmed that the messages were being received, which guaranteed even more 'spam messages'.
The final bit of the decoded message related to trials with a new rotor wiring system produced by a local engineer. Apparently, the system promised to make the Enigma machines easier to use, but the coloured insulation on the wiring was rubbing away, (presumably an interaction between the synthetic dyes being used with early, less stable plastics), exposing the conductors and causing the whole machine to short circuit and stop working ('die' as the message coldly put it). The cracked message warned other users to check their rotors to see whether they had any of the 'brightly coloured experimental wiring' and if so, to stop using them and return the rotors to 'Wilhelm Gatz' if they identified the so-called 'blue screening of death'.
RESPECTFULLY REQUESTING YOUR ASSISTANCE IN EXTREME CONFIDENCE
I am certain this message comes as a suprise to you since you do not know me. I have obtained your name from French Resistance fighters as one that can be trusted with my confidence.
Two months ago, my father was kidnapped and murdered by the Nazi SS. I have need to transfer the sum of US$25,000,000 (twenty-five million) from an account in Credit Lyonnais in France to an account outside of German territory, of which your payment shall be 30% if you agree to our proposal...
The copy I downloaded matched the sha1sum. I've put a copy on my own server if you want to download it from me: enigma-suite-0.73.1.tar.gz [ofdoom.com].
Perhaps to export it FROM the US, yes. Only thing is - it wasn't invented in the US. Or maybe you are referring to the DMCA? In that case, let's see how well the Germans are protected by US law.
More than 3 are unbroken (Score:5, Informative)
Error (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Error (Score:2)
Re:Error (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, they put too much faith in the encryption technology, and didn't put enough effort into securing the rest of the process. It's not unusual, many of today's systems have similar issues.
The comments in Bruce Schneier's blog [schneier.com] list some more things that went wrong in the Enigma process.
Parent
Re:Error (Score:5, Interesting)
Since the crib relied on the Enigma's inability to encode a letter to itself, the received message must have consisted entirely of the letter L.
To be precise, the message was slightly more likely to have consisted entirely of the letter L. There's no mathematical guarantee that it would contain all Ls, but a sufficiently long ciphertext message with no Ls in the output would've indicated that, with high probability, there were an unusually large number of Ls in the input. Without knowing the actual story, I'd guess that the message probably wasn't all that long, and the math would probably predict only a few more Ls than normal... but that was enough of a hint that when combined with a knowledge of human behavior gave the cryptanalysts reason to assume it was all Ls and see if they could find key settings that would produce the ciphertext from that input.
Even at the height of Bletchley Park's codebreaking efficiency, nearly every day's break came down to some clever guess of that sort... "What if we tried this?". I imagine the "all Ls" scenario was one of the easier guesses. In order to make it more certain, the codebreakers even asked the front-line forces to do apparently bizarre things, just so they'd have a keyword they could look for in the subsequent reports.
Amazing stuff...
Parent
Re:Error (Score:2)
Re:Error (Score:3, Interesting)
power of proper encryption (Score:2)
Re:power of proper encryption (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:power of proper encryption (Score:2)
Coral Cache? (Score:2)
I think you're all just messing with my head.
-Charles
Re: Coral Cache? (Score:2)
Re: Coral Cache? (Score:2)
You said it. I'm glad I'm not the only one.
It looks to me like Corel Cache can be Slashdotted as well. Indeed, the only time I ever find that Corel Cache helps me to read a story that /. links to is when someone submits the Corel Cache link, and I can then go to the original story that is supposed to be cached, because the rest of /. is hammering Corel Cache instead.
Corel Cache doesn't have a special "B
Build your own Enigma Machine (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Build your own Enigma Machine (Score:2, Informative)
Java Enigma Simulator (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Java Enigma Simulator (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry
Parent
Wasn't the enigma cracked? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wasn't the enigma cracked? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wasn't the enigma cracked? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is just not true. Enigma was broken using "bombes" which were not computers by any reasonable definition of the term. A bombe was simply an electromechanical device that tested each possible rotor setting. Colossus, OTOH, considered by some to be the first programmable digital computer, was
Re:Wasn't the enigma cracked? (Score:4, Informative)
ian
Parent
Re:Wasn't the enigma cracked? (Score:3, Informative)
If a cop is wearing body armor, it doesn't mean that he can walk out into a torrent of incoming bullets. Chances are that one of those bullets will find a weakness in his armor, or simply strike him in a place where he's not protected. Similar principle here.
LK
Re:Hey knobjockey (Score:3, Interesting)
The parent poster is correct: a properly used Enigma machine is effectively unbreakable with the technology of the day and, for that matter, the technology of the next few decades too.
The majority of the users of the Enigma machine were not using it properly and so left cracks for BP to exploit. All this is well documented by people who do know a great deal about cryptographic systems. Some of them worked for BP and have in-depth first hand knowledge of what they write about.
Even today's technology, th
Enigma is fairly close to a OTP (Score:5, Interesting)
The full Enigma code is extremely difficult to break. The machine used by Alan Turing (Colossus) was massively parallel and highly optimized for the task - so much so that it is actually able to compute something like ten times as many keys per second as a modern Pentium 4 using the same algorithm. Not bad, for a machine of that era.
The Enigma suffered from numerous weaknesses - almost all of them operator error. The encryption mechanism itself was damn good and, if used correctly each time, every time, it would have been horribly difficult for the Bletchley Park team to break.
The one event that turned Enigma transparent was the re-transmission of a message without the cogs being randomized first. Because a machine had already been recovered, Turing knew what the cogs were, just not where they should be in relation to each other. By having the same message sent twice without change and without a prior reset, it was possible to overlay the two messages and thereby infer virtually everything else.
This only allows you to crack messages which use the same prng for initialization and identical cogs. Since the cogs were designed to be swappable, non-standard configurations would have been possible. These would not have been crackable - and would likely not be crackable today, if non-standard enough. (The number of arrangements you would need to test increases with the factorial of the number of ways the cogs could be designed, as well as the factorial of the number of ways the cogs could be inserted into the machine.)
The possibility exists that certain units may have used non-standard Enigma codes, but if that is the case, those codes will NOT be broken by this effort. The groups that spirited high-ranking Germans to South America and other "secure" locations must have had a communication system that the Allies had not yet deciphered, as they must have been able to operate over extremely large distances very quickly, making the use of radio a certainty.
It is also likely that some units within the German military adopted their own "extra secure" practices when using the Enigma system internally. These may or may not be crackable, depending on how paranoid the commanders were.
Parent
Re:Enigma is fairly close to a OTP (Score:2, Interesting)
Enigma is fundamentally flawed. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, in WW2, it was the misuse of enigma that made it particularily easy to break --- It might only take one weather report to learn the daily subkey. Had Enigma been properly used, it would probably have been nearly unbreakable with WW2 era technology.
Parent
Re:Enigma is fundamentally flawed. (Score:3, Interesting)
One tactic they used was 'Gardening' where they sent out bombers to mine a particular sea area, then sit back and wait for standard message reporting the new minefield
Re:Enigma is fundamentally flawed. (Score:4, Insightful)
So getting the daily subkey from a bungled weather report, would only help the British to read messages from a particular branch, in a limited area, for a period of just 24 hours.
--
Regards
Peter H.S.
Parent
Re:Enigma is fairly close to a OTP (Score:2)
A valve does the same thing as a transistor, and I find it extremely hard to believe that 1500 transistors, no matter how cunninly arranged to execute a single algorithm, could outperform 55 [wikipedia.org] million transistors.
And I also doubt if they were switching several thousand million times a second.
Yes, I know, many of those transistors are
Re:Wasn't the enigma cracked? (Score:3, Funny)
Jaysyn
and the message is . . . (Score:3, Funny)
Re:and the message is . . . (Score:3, Funny)
Do I have to? (Score:3, Funny)
Excuse me... (Score:2)
Re:Excuse me... (Score:3, Funny)
You'd think they could just ask the Germans for the cleartext.
Sorry I thought this was hilarious (Score:2)
I read that and burst out laughing immediately thinking of three Polish soldiers running with the Enigma machine backwards and falling over and cracking the case.
"oh no we have cracked ze case"
"lets get out of here"
Re:Sorry I thought this was hilarious (Score:2)
Re:Sorry I thought this was hilarious (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Sorry I thought this was hilarious (Score:2)
Cryptonomicon! (Score:2)
The 2nd message is (Score:2)
I have cracked the other two (Score:5, Funny)
Questionable Legality (Score:5, Interesting)
You're all terrorists. Off to Guantanamo with you.
Re:Questionable Legality (Score:3, Informative)
No. You're letting them control you because they always use the acronym.
It is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It is first, foremost, and only a copyright act.
The Enigma messages aren't copyrighted in any real sense (copyrights that belonged to the Nazi Party went to interesting places - at one point they were public-domained by an Allied government as "spoils of war"), and moreover t
Re:Well (Score:3, Funny)
Well, makes sense to me. Which activity is more interesting?
Historical information ! (Score:4, Funny)
Second Message Now Cracked (Score:4, Funny)
It warned other units that a local garage mechanic had offered to 'improve' their Enigma machine to make it run faster, but after he left they discovered he'd inserted a small additional module which meant that whatever was transmitted, there was an extra last line which read "Come to Fritz's autos for a great deal on used Volkswagens". The cracked message told all other users only to visit trusted garages and not accept any offers of performance upgrades because such offers were the work of 'trojan enemy conspirators that operated like an unwanted virus in the body of our glorious Fatherland'.
There were also complaints of many false messages being received that decoded into offers to supply the German solders with 'processed meat rations' captured from allied troops - the cracked message warned Enigma users to ignore the flood of 'unwanted messages about spam that deflect focus from our vital war efforts' and not to reply as this only confirmed that the messages were being received, which guaranteed even more 'spam messages'.
The final bit of the decoded message related to trials with a new rotor wiring system produced by a local engineer. Apparently, the system promised to make the Enigma machines easier to use, but the coloured insulation on the wiring was rubbing away, (presumably an interaction between the synthetic dyes being used with early, less stable plastics), exposing the conductors and causing the whole machine to short circuit and stop working ('die' as the message coldly put it). The cracked message warned other users to check their rotors to see whether they had any of the 'brightly coloured experimental wiring' and if so, to stop using them and return the rotors to 'Wilhelm Gatz' if they identified the so-called 'blue screening of death'.
Another Message Decoded and Translated (Score:5, Funny)
RESPECTFULLY REQUESTING YOUR ASSISTANCE IN EXTREME CONFIDENCE
I am certain this message comes as a suprise to you since you do not know me. I have obtained your name from French Resistance fighters as one that can be trusted with my confidence.
Two months ago, my father was kidnapped and murdered by the Nazi SS. I have need to transfer the sum of US$25,000,000 (twenty-five million) from an account in Credit Lyonnais in France to an account outside of German territory, of which your payment shall be 30% if you agree to our proposal...
Re:Source code? (Score:2)
I've put a copy on my own server if you want to download it from me: enigma-suite-0.73.1.tar.gz [ofdoom.com].
Re:Isn't this against US law? (Score:2)