Enigma Machine for Sale on eBay

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?"

Re:Potential buyer

[Gregb05]

Tagged Godwin.
MPAA doesn't want unbreakable encryption; who would they sue?


England and America for violation of DMCA?

Re:The future

[MichaelSmith]

I can see these being attached to every Blu-ray2 and HD-DVD2 player.....

Then we really shouldn't have driven Alan Turing into suicide.

What's remarkable

[fishthegeek]

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 [wikipedia.org]

Re:How secure is Enigma these days?

[Ecuador]

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).

Re:Question

[Mr. Moose]

Yes. All VI commands are Enigma encrypted.

why not make your own?

[elgatozorbas]

If I would make one, it would be all electromechanical instead of electronic. The breaking of the enigma code (as excellently described in e.g. Simon Singh's The code book) was only possible by exploiting implementation details. Kodus to the makers of the electronics kit, but a machine with an implementation different to the original one, loses most of its appeal to me.

Re:How secure is Enigma these days?

[tokul]

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.

Re:U-505 and Enigma in Chicago

[turing_m]

"Probably justifiable at the time, but one of those slippery slope-type situations like Lincoln jailing journalists under the sedition act....like Gitmo..."

Anything and everything is justifiable... on the side that wins the war. Classify the truth, indoctrinate those who don't know, and kill or imprison those who know enough to throw doubt on your justification.