Rare and Hardest To Crack Enigma Code Machine Sells For $437,000 (zdnet.com) 46
An anonymous reader writes: A rare 1944 four-rotor M4 Enigma cipher machine, considered one of the hardest challenges for the Allies to decrypt, has sold at a Christie's auction for $437,955. As noted by Christie's, the M4 Enigma has a special place in computing history as the Allied efforts to break its encryption led to the development of the first programmable computer, the one developed at Bletchley Park that was used to secretly break the M4, giving Allied forces visibility into German naval planning during the Battle of the Atlantic until its surrender in mid-1945.
The M4 Enigmas are considered rare because they were made in smaller numbers than three-rotor machines. After Germany capitulated, the country ordered troops to destroy remaining Enigmas in order to keep them from Allied forces. After the war Winston Churchill also ordered all remaining Enigmas destroyed to help preserve the secret of Allied decoding successes at Bletchley. The M4 Enigmas were made on the order of Admiral Karl Donitz, the commander of the German U-boat fleet, who had concerns over repeated Allied successes against his submarines. The M4 became available to the U-boat fleet in May 1941, preventing Allies from knowing where German's U-boats were positioned for almost a year until Turing and Joe Desch in Dayton, Ohio developed the computer that broke M4 encryption to decipher German messages. By mid-1943 the majority of M4 Enigma messages were being read by the Allies, but it was not until the 1970s that knowledge of the Allied successes against the Enigma was made public. "Rival auction house Sotheby's sold an M4 Enigma last year for $800,000, which may have reached a higher selling price because it was one of one of 15 Enigma machines found in a bunker at Germany's key Northern European naval base in Trondheim, Norway, which Germany had occupied since 1940," adds ZDNet.
The M4 Enigmas are considered rare because they were made in smaller numbers than three-rotor machines. After Germany capitulated, the country ordered troops to destroy remaining Enigmas in order to keep them from Allied forces. After the war Winston Churchill also ordered all remaining Enigmas destroyed to help preserve the secret of Allied decoding successes at Bletchley. The M4 Enigmas were made on the order of Admiral Karl Donitz, the commander of the German U-boat fleet, who had concerns over repeated Allied successes against his submarines. The M4 became available to the U-boat fleet in May 1941, preventing Allies from knowing where German's U-boats were positioned for almost a year until Turing and Joe Desch in Dayton, Ohio developed the computer that broke M4 encryption to decipher German messages. By mid-1943 the majority of M4 Enigma messages were being read by the Allies, but it was not until the 1970s that knowledge of the Allied successes against the Enigma was made public. "Rival auction house Sotheby's sold an M4 Enigma last year for $800,000, which may have reached a higher selling price because it was one of one of 15 Enigma machines found in a bunker at Germany's key Northern European naval base in Trondheim, Norway, which Germany had occupied since 1940," adds ZDNet.
And now... (Score:3)
On Display (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure there are three-rotor and four-rotor Enigmas on display at the Smithsonian (they had them when I visited 20 years ago.) There is a three rotor on display at the US Airforce Museum in Dayton, Ohio, along with some contemporary US cryptographic equipment, though if you blink you'll miss it. It's in the WWII exhibit, near the very early flight simulator display. The best example, though, is in the U-Boat exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. They have a four-rotor, along with the box of extra rotors, with one disassembled so you can see how it works. They also have an intact Enigma code book, which is even more rare than the Enigma, as those were destroyed even before the Enigma machines. Of course, they have the whole U-Boat it came with, as well, so you can see the radio room where they would use it.
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The best example, though, is in the U-Boat exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. They have a four-rotor, along with the box of extra rotors, with one disassembled so you can see how it works. They also have an intact Enigma code book, which is even more rare than the Enigma, as those were destroyed even before the Enigma machines. Of course, they have the whole U-Boat it came with, as well, so you can see the radio room where they would use it.
Damn, I'm mad I missed that. The wife and I went to Chicago a few years ago and, while it was like pulling teeth, I got her to agree to go to one museum so I picked Science and Industry. But by the time we got to the U-boat exhibit she was pretty over it so I had to quickly run through there by myself.
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The best example, though, is in the U-Boat exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. They have a four-rotor, along with the box of extra rotors, with one disassembled so you can see how it works. They also have an intact Enigma code book, which is even more rare than the Enigma, as those were destroyed even before the Enigma machines. Of course, they have the whole U-Boat it came with, as well, so you can see the radio room where they would use it.
Damn, I'm mad I missed that. The wife and I went to Chicago a few years ago and, while it was like pulling teeth, I got her to agree to go to one museum so I picked Science and Industry. But by the time we got to the U-boat exhibit she was pretty over it so I had to quickly run through there by myself.
Getting to that part of the windy city is pretty dangerous these days.. Glad you got out alive. But yea, I've been though the U-Boat a couple of times, it's quite interesting what those German sailors did and what they did it in. I cannot imagine going to sea in that tiny tin can with 25 of my soon to be best friends, much less going to war and getting shot at and sinking on purpose.
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Do not miss the National Cryptologic Museum, aka the NSA [public] Museum, just outside the gates of Fort Meade. THEY have an Enigma you can actually use. Also a bunch of other cool stuff, plus a gift store. As one might expect, they don't advertise a lot. Free admission and worth the trip if you are in the DC area.
https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryp... [nsa.gov]
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History vs Pointless Junk (Score:2)
An amazing piece of history sells for so little when complete crap sells for millions:
https://www.thetalko.com/thing... [thetalko.com]
Humans are weird.
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Yes, they are.
One of the things that's weird about them is that not all of them value the same things equally (hence the possibility of...trade, which is all about me giving you something I have in exchange for something you have, and which requires that you value what I am giving up more than you value what you have, and vice versa).
Me, I wouldn't value an Enigma machine as high as this one sold for, so I wouldn't have given $400-odd-thousand for one....
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It's a historical artifact, and one of the few surviv
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Yes, they are.
But always remember that the "value" of something is only what someone else is willing to pay for it and nothing else.
What would you rather have: a 2x Cheeseburger meal or a 1kb gold bar? (quick search 1kg is about $60K USD today).
Most people would say the gold bar, obviously. But suppose you were on a desert oasis with nobody else around except the inedible robot making the offer? And you hadn't had any food for a week? Value is quite different then. That's why I used the scare
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Many times these high-dollar/Euro sales are a means for the ultra-wealthy transfer money while avoiding taxes. The actual object remains in a customs duty-free warehouse.
Here's a couple of examples.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a... [wsj.com]
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0... [nytimes.com]
Parking (Score:2)
It's more to park wealth than to transfer it. The minute it comes out of the customs warehouse you'll have to pay a tariff or excise tax.
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It's more to park wealth than to transfer it. The minute it comes out of the customs warehouse you'll have to pay a tariff or excise tax.
The whole point to the scheme is that the item never leaves the warehouse.
Relativity (Score:2)
If I had the means I'd spend $400,000 on an Enigma long before I spent $400,000 on a car.
Subject (Score:5, Insightful)
The Imitation Game is a great watch if you haven't seen it.
Also, Cryptonomicon is a great read of a heavily fictionalized account of an autistic supernerd who gets pulled into service alongside Turing. It goes through acquisition of devices, breaking of the codes, and the Ultra security level of deciding what to do with the decoded info. It has great discussions of these issues.
The author, Neal Stephenson, is one of very few authors that's a true whiz with prose, along the lines of Mark Twain or Poe. Like, seriously.
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While I love some of Stephenson's work, some of it I also find...ponderous and pretentious.
The best quote I remember reading about one of his books was "Neal Stepehson needs a good editor, and that editor needs a good machete."
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"Too much nerdy detail" was also a contemporary criticism of Moby-Dick, but I wouldn't have omitted a word of either work.
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I too recommend this novel.
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Not to mention: 'until Turing and Joe Desch in Dayton, Ohio developed the computer that broke M4 encryption to decipher German messages'
Turing took the british design to Ohio, Desch was in charge of NCR engineering, the americans were going to brute force M4 using 336 bombes, but Turning developed a way to use less.
So the US work was really just a continuation of the British work, lead by the Britsh inventor (Turing). Pity that isnt mentioned.
Not just rare... (Score:1)
The futility of hiding a success (Score:2)
This is one example which shows the futility of hiding a success. Both sides of the war ordered the destruction of these machines, it's one thing they could agree on although both for different reasons, yet here we are with several of them still existing and the coding and decoding processes widely understood.
It just goes to show that you can't stop the dissemination of information. If one machine survives the efforts to destroy all of them are in vain.
Re:The futility of hiding a success (Score:4, Interesting)
The Allies didn't order the destruction of Enigma cipher machines; even if they had, there were versions in the hands of neutral parties such as the Swiss. Churchill did order the destruction of the Colossus code-breaking machines.
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Ahhh thanks for the clarification.
Re: The futility of hiding a success (Score:2)
Point of order:
Colossus was designed to break the 5 level teleprinter FISH encryption, not the Enigma.
Everything at BP was ordered destroyed, except for a few Colossi which ended up at GCHQ.
The reason for the secrecy was to enable GCHQ and the US to exploit the knowlege gained during the war to decrypt the postwar communications of other countries not aware of their abilities. Many countries used equipment similar to the Enigma and the Siemens teleprinter devices.
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Yes, I mentioned Fish in another comment and didn't want to repeat myself. As far as I'm aware, there weren't any Enigma machines at Bletchley.
Revisionist view of history? (Score:2)
That statement is bordering on revisionist: Turing and the team at Bletchley Park developed the computer that cracked the Enigma M4. The team in the US developed a copy of the British computer, with Alan Turing's help. At least that's how I've h
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The story you've heard is certainly how it's presented in memoirs of people at Bletchley Park, including some of the American liaison staff. Moreover, the summary (and probably TFA, but of course I have not read that) is also incorrect to say that the first programmable computer was developed to break the Enigma M4. The bombes used to recover Enigma settings were not programmable: the programmable Colossus was developed to break a different cipher, the Lorenz Schlüsselzusatz 42 (aka "Fish" or "Tunny").
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From Jack Good, chapter 19 "Enigma and Fish" of Code Breakers, ed. Hinsley and Stripp, ISBN 0-19-820479-5:
So I think you undersell it a bit. I also think that it's a bit anachronistic to insist that a
A lot of collaboration. Mostly Poland, Rejewski (Score:2)
An entire basketball team can play for an hour, scoring 100 points, each player also preventing points by the other team, and fans will credit whoever happens to shoot the last basket as having "won the game". That's kinda like what happened with Enigma. Poland scored most of the points. The British scored a point right before the buzzer, and the Americans built a robot that scores points all day long. :)
Poland had been breaking enigma for years before WWII. Marian Rejewski came up with a lot of differe
An analogy (Score:2)
Here is an analogy to understand the importance of the American efforts.
One of the British strengths is that they had long been major naval power. The Royal Navy was thr largest Navy in the world, over 200 ships. The US built over 3,000 ships in three years.
The UK had a guy who could, goven enough time, build a copy of the Enigma.
The US had companies like NCR (National Cash Register) who could fulfill an order for hundreds of better, more automated machines.
UK vs USA (Score:2)
The UK had the brains to figure out HOW to defeat the machines.
Rejewski's contribution was critical because it got the process started. But there were many more tricks, it was a complex and quite non-intuative process to break the codes. And both Enigma and later Fish (Colossus) were British wins, even if some manufacturing in the USA was helpful.
The USA had the brains to break the (weaker) Japanese codes.
And the British Admiralty had the idiocy to use very weak codes that the Germans easily broke and so
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That's not factually accurate. Turing's most important contribution was his ideas on how to developed the Polish bomba kryptologiczna device into the British Bombe, which was electro-mechanical device, a better device. An engineer then figured out how to turn Turing's ideas into an actual machine, code named CANTAB.
That was in 1939. Rejewski had been breaking German Enigma messages since at least 1935, probably 1934.
It's also not accurate to say any person or group broke "the Enigma code" - there are fo
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See
Erskine, Ralph (2006), "The Poles Reveal their Secrets: Alastair Denniston's Account of the July 1939 Meeting at Pyry", Cryptologia (published December 2006), 30 (4), pp. 294â"305, doi:10.1080/01611190600920944
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The British did not actually use Rejewski's technique -- it was too brittle, and failed shortly after he gave it to them. But the British were certainly inspired by him.
The actual technique was not just a brute force search -- there was much more to it than that using a concept of "menus" and a diagonal method. Very, very clever stuff which I only half understand.
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> The British did not actually use Rejewski's technique
One of the techniques that Rejewski came up wasn't used by the British machine.
Rejewski had at least four or five techniques that I recall offhand. Some of which are atill used to this day.
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By the way, the basis of Turing's machine (which helped narrow dowj the possibilities before applying the other techniques) was cribs. That's the fundamental weakness Turing took advantage of, cribs.
Cribs make it so if you already have a bunch of messages that you've decrypted before, you can use those to help decrypt a new message.
Therefore, a pre-requisite to using cribs is that you must already have a method to decrypt them, albeit more slowly. Turing's device would be worthless without the the message
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Ps, if you're interested, we can actually break one using a crib together, so you can see exactly how it works. I'll walk you through it step-by-step. We'll use a nice long crib, "seadragon".
It's kind of a cool puzzle. If you like Sudoku, Scramble, and cross word puzzles it's a similar kind of thing.
Does it come with a "Schreibmax"? (Score:3)
That was a peripheral device you could mount on top of the enigma that would print out the deciphered messages, reducing the manual work to simply typing in the cipher that came over the radio. A device just 1.5 steps short of a sort of fully automatic crypto telex via radio. Very neat and very high tech back then.
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That was a peripheral device you could mount on top of the enigma that would print out the deciphered messages, reducing the manual work to simply typing in the cipher that came over the radio. A device just 1.5 steps short of a sort of fully automatic crypto telex via radio. Very neat and very high tech back then.
Very cool. I did not know about this. It's not mentioned in any of the standard books on Enigma.
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Fish was exactly a fully automatic crypo telex via radio. It is the code that Colossus broke.
Ha! (Score:5, Funny)
Ha! They paid half a mil for that encryption machine, and it is already cracked! What idiots, a quick google search would have shown it!
Ordered destroyed? (Score:2)
According to various accounts I've read, Britain sold all of the Enigma machines they recovered from Germany after the war, to second-tier allies.
They also kept (some of) the codebreaking equipment around, so they could read the traffic sent by those allies.
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Thanks for the interesting link.
Reagan's gaff was almost as good as telling the Japanese they needed to send their depth charges deeper.