For £70,000, You Might Be Able to Own an Enigma 65
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.
How much (Score:3)
Re: How much (Score:2)
Free machines for third-world nations! (Score:3, Interesting)
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! (Score:5, Informative)
apparently so everyone would think we won by valor rather than by cheating.
Not the case. They did not want the Germans to know that they had cracked it. That would trigger a German redesign and the Allies would lose a critical advantage ( i.e. many more lives ) .
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Re: Free machines for third-world nations! (Score:1)
After the war they didn't want the Soviets to know. And for the part about the "valor"... Without soldiers on the ground, sailors in the seas and airmen in the air, the Bletchey folks would have either been bombed or gathered up and imprisoned after the war in realspace had been lost. They would be the first to admit it, unlike you shit geeks who hold in spite anyone with good physical skills because you can't match them. Actually, you couldn't match the Bletchey folks as well, you lack willpower and self-d
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Even after the war they wanted to keep it a secret - just because the hostilities ended didn't mean they had no more use for the advantage decryption gave them. Even if occupied Germany wasn't a real threat anymore, why would the Allies (or at least UK and USA) want the world to know what their capabilities are in terms of decryption?
Re: Free machines for third-world nations! (Score:2)
Also, many countries continued to use enigma machines under licence after the war precisely because they were still believed to be unbreakable.
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rather boring indeed,
read this instead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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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.
Re:Free machines for third-world nations! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
No. The reason why the allies kept extremely mum about cracking the enigma was simply because they had learned the hard way that this was the right thing to do.
It goes back to the first world war when the British "Room 40" cracked German naval codes. The German navy knew nothing of this until W. Churchill published a history of the war where he "spilled the beans" about it. The German Navy and army where shocked when they learned how their crypto had been compromised and decided to strengthen their crypto to previously unheard levels. That is the reason why they bought and deployed the Enigma machines.
The Enigma was practically unbreakable at the time if used correctly, so it was by a thin margin that the Allies where able to decrypt Enigma messages. So they felt it was absolutely vital reveal nothing about their successes after the war, so future potential enemies didn't improved their crypto and crypto-procedures even more.
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apparently so everyone would think we won by valor rather than by cheating
You have an odd definition of "cheating".
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I imagine he's referring to the idea that certain methods were seen as "ungentlemanly" and against the idea of chivalry and fair play. Previous examples were submarines and the rifle. The former because it was a weapon that hid from its enemies. The latter because it was one of the first times* that a weapon was used to aim at an individual from a distance - previously it was considered impractical, so mass volleys were used instead.
* Yes, archers may have done this in the past, but they tended to use volle
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Happy times (Score:5, Funny)
OYJOE (Score:2, Interesting)
oyjoe evquc vthkg xukhd lnmiq xzjuq ssoui ombat rudso ymblf qaxto dzjw
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5f6c4bf029a26ca2ff29e25c303673bc56767d42dbc3369d310cee1af900110d
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You had a newline character at the end of your string.
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You had a newline character at the end of your string.
That is called strong encryption.
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Cool. (Score:5, Interesting)
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That sounds less like a true OTP and more like just switching keys (=the coordinate grid used) between each message.
According to my understanding of what you described... If the same characters would occur multiple times within a message, the ground ops would have to give the same x/y pair multiple times... Exposing the message to a frequency analysis and such. Of course it might be practically impossible (due to the content of very short messages with little repetition, etc.) but it sounds like at least at
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Not sure how big the grid is, but even a 10 X 10 grid would have space for at least 3 full alphabets, perhaps with extra sets of common letters like vowels.
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Historically accurate image [amazonaws.com].
Don't buy it! (Score:5, Funny)
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Don't buy this. It's all part of a GCHQ conspiracy to foist weak encryption on the populace. The Enigma has been cracked. I repeat, the Enigma HAS been cracked! You have been warned.
All joking aside, historically that's exactly what happened! The crack of the Enigma in particular and German/Axis crypto in general, was kept very secret just to foist broken encryption onto the world. Winston Churchill himself actually ordered the plans for the Colossus electronic computer (built to crack the Geheimschreiber) was to be destroyed and the machines (there were several at that time) to be broken up, no piece to be bigger than a man's fist.
It was kept secret with the expressed intent of luring
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No. During the war, the fact they'd cracked Enigma was kept a secret to prevent the Germans from adopting better (potentially unbreakable) encryption.
After the war, yes. The British saw Enigma being used by various governments and decided to keep the secret a bit longer.
Colossus was never used to crack Enigma, it was designed for the Lorenz cipher machine which used a different principle.
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All of which I said? ... Or didn't voice an opinion on. (Of course the war time secrecy was to prevent the enemy from knowing you're knowing. Anything else would have been daft beyond belief, and I didn't say anything else.)
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All joking aside, historically that's exactly what happened! The crack of the Enigma in particular and German/Axis crypto in general, was kept very secret just to foist broken encryption onto the world.
The Enigma with Steckerbrett used with good operational procedures was actually practically unbreakable even in the decades after the war. While some aspects of the Enigma designed "leaked" info about its configuration, it was a sound design, and AFAIK, practically identically to what the allied used. That the allies could decrypt Enigma messages was almost entirely caused by bad German operational procedures and the capture of code books. Even today it is a massive computational effort to break historical
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Yes, there is much truth in that. (Though you discount the rapid advances in computational power just after the war. Even though the computational effort is "massive" that only spurred the various signals intelligence organisations to buy more computers).
However, as no-one thought the Enigma had been broken to the extent that it had, no-one put that much effort in to perfect crypto hygiene, not reusing or reordering rotors (the Germans famously got that completely wrong, thinking that the strength was incre
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Winston Churchill himself actually ordered the plans for the Colossus electronic computer (built to crack the Geheimschreiber) was to be destroyed and the machines (there were several at that time) to be broken up, no piece to be bigger than a man's fist.
Yes. Oddly enough, the British shared their cryptanalysis work with the USA, including their design of the Colussus machines*. After the war, the Americans never destroyed their plans and based a lot of commercial computing development on these designs.
*There was an interesting anecdote about a visit by American engineers to Bletchley Park. The original Colussus was based on relay logic and the US engineers had built their own copy to this design. When a newer version of the Colussus was built, the British
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That goes beyond my knowledge of the subject, but it makes sense. That said, the British did have the know how, with Turing and company building computers just after the war, but Britain was just too deep in the hole financially and otherwise to devote much energy, effort, determination to the task. So that the Americans pulled ahead was probably due to a number of (other) factors as well.
And those vacuum tubes ran hot as well as silent. Several kW:s total if if memory serves. At the aforementioned tour we
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England paid for it's continued survival by handing over just about every technological and engineering breakthrough they had mastered or were in the process of mastering to the US. In return the US supplied England with ships, planes, ammunition, food, trucks, clothing, fuel, and eventually US lives. And the folks at Bletchley Park would have had a much harder time breaking the Enigma code if not for the 2 Polish mathematicians who originally reverse engineered the pre-war business version model of the mac
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And the folks at Bletchley Park would have had a much harder time breaking the Enigma code if not for the 2 Polish mathematicians who originally reverse engineered the pre-war business version model of the machine and forwarded all their research to England prior to Germany invading Poland.
I don't know about "much harder". It was a help that's certain and they provided a few insights, but if Turing's biography is anything to go by, it wasn't crucial. Turing and his ilk did most of the work esp. when it came to automating the process. And it's the automation that made the process quick enough to be of practical value.
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e.g. If a convoy was due from Italy to North Africa they sent a reconnaissance flight out.
This was to provide plausibility in that the Germans could reason the attack was due to being found by conventional means by the Allies rather than code-breaking.
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So? Is someone planning to set up an "Enigma café" where people can come in and encrypt their telegraph, heliograph, or wigwag messages before sending them? There may be more than one flaw to that plan . . .
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The ironic thing is that before DES and PGP were common in the early 1990s, the most common encryption utility on UNIX was the crypt (1) command [1]. This is based on one, 256 element, rotor, rather than multiple rotors with just the alphabet on them.
[1]: This is different from crypt (3), the password hashing algorithm.
Just one? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't you need two?
Re: Just one? (Score:2)
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Don't you need two?
Not for the strongest form of encryption: write only.
The OPM Will be in attendance (Score:4, Funny)
The OPM Will be an attendance at the auction in the hope of updating their encryption technology.
Link (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.sothebys.com/en/auc... [sothebys.com]
I wish you good bidding!
Tetris? (Score:1)
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enigma museum (Score:2)
You can buy one today at http://enigmamuseum.com/ [enigmamuseum.com]
The web site is pretty interesting. Dr. Tom Perera often shows some of his Enigma machines at ham radio shows in the North East, and sometimes lectures on them, too.
That's crazy! (Score:2)
I found another Enigma for only USD$8.16 (as of this writing) here. [ebay.com]
70K GBP for an incomplete Enigma (Score:1)