Do-It-Yourself Electronic Enigma Machine 213
Radio Shack Robot writes "The Enigma-E is a DIY Building Kit that enables you to build your own electronic variant of the famous Enigma coding machine that was used by the German army during WWII. It works just like a real Enigma and is compatible with an M3 and M4 Enigma as well as the standard Service Machines. A message encrypted on, say, a real Enigma M4 can be read on the Enigma-E and vice versa."
Here's my Electronic Enigma Machine (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How does it work ?? (Score:5, Informative)
applet (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How does it work ?? (Score:5, Informative)
The machine has several variable settings that affect the operation of the machine. The user must select three rotors from a set of rotors to be used in the machine. A rotor contains one-to-one mappings of all the letters. Some Enigma machines had more than 3 rotors which just added to the number of possible encryption combinations. The other variable element in the machine is the plug board. The plug board allowed for pairs of letters to be remapped before the encryption process started and after it ended.
When a key is pressed, an electrical current is sent through the machine. The current first passes through the plug board, then through the three rotors, through the reflector which reverses the current, back through the three rotors, back through the plug board and then the encrypted letter is lit on the display. After the display is lit up, the rotors rotate. The rotors rotate similar to an odometer where the right most rotor must complete one revolution before the middle rotor rotated one position and so on.
As the current passes through each component in the Enigma machine, the letter gets remapped to another letter. The plug board performed the first remapping. If there is a connection between two letters, the letters are remapped to each other. For example if there is a connection between "A" and "F", "A" would get remapped to "F" and "F" would get remapped to "A". If this isn't a connection for a particular letter, the letter doesn't get remapped. After the plug board, the letters are remapped through the rotors. Each rotor contains one-to-one mappings of letters but since the rotors rotate on each key press, the mappings of the rotors change on every key press. Once the current passes through the rotors, it goes into the reflector. The reflector is very similar to a rotor except that it doesn't rotate so the one-to-one mappings are always the same. The whole encryption process for a single letter contains a minimum of 7 remappings (the current passes through the rotors twice) and a maximum of 9 remappings (if the letter has a connection in the plug board).
In order to decrypt a message, the receiver must have the encrypted message, and know which rotors were used, the connections on the plug board and the initial settings of the rotors. To decrypt a message, the receiver would set up the machine identically to the way the sender initially had it and would type in the encrypted message. The output of typing in the encrypted message would be the original message. Without the knowledge of the state of the machine when the original message was typed in, it is extremely difficult to decode a message.
Re:How does it work ?? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
One of the interesting weaknesses of the Enigma cypher was no letter could be encoded as itself. One part of the cracking process was to look for messages that had a known content (weather reports were a favorate, the Germans were very keen on standard formats in their reports) This could be used to narrow down the number of possible keys
Source [mlb.co.jp] A tired German operator has been told to send out dummy messages and he typed only the last letter of the keyboard : ``L''. The British code breaking expert immediately recognized the missing ``L'' in the enciphered message and they got a very big crib.
* [cipher]DAOACQAOFFNNHDYAPSGZHEPTWCFZEPAARVDZOSWJDH XMESGWSGRQYOZL LLLLL
* [plain] LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
Enigma Books (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How does it work ?? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Original Messages (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the flippant answer is Argentina (Or Brazil).
On a more serious note, you might try Latvia [www.dol.ru]; in 1998 about 500 Latvians, former members of the Waffen-SS marched through Riga to celebrate the 55th anniversary of the SS.
Up until 1996, you could have looked in Indiana in the United States [aeronautics.ru]:
Interestingly, the amount of the pension paid to these former SS by the German government varies based on their final rank in the SS -- higher ranks get a bigger pension. Only recently -- and only after international pressure -- did the German government modify its pension law to strip the pension from war criminals, and even so, there is no requirement that any investigation be made of recipients, nor is there any mechanism to do so, so even known war criminals can continue to collect payments from the German government.
Ironically, some war criminals even receive, in addition to their normal pensions what are called "victim's" pensions -- including those believed to have massacred American soldiers. The following [remember.org] was written in 1997, and thus may be slightly out of date:
At the same time that Germany provides monthly pension payments to former members of the SS and war criminals, persons forced to be slave laborers for the Nazi regime get far less [tomhayden.com]:
So, frankly, any Old Folks (Pensioner's) Home in Germany should provide you with plenty of "original Nazis", living comfortably thanks to the largess of the current German government, while their victims -- those who survived at all, those who haven't died while waiting for their reparations -- continue to suffer.
(Of course, I will now be modded down as an anti-German racist [slashdot.org], becaus
Re:Bummer (Score:2, Informative)
"Both addresses below do ship worldwide so ordering one shouldn't be a problem."
Enigma-E Order Page [www.xat.nl]
Re:Who needs one? (Score:4, Informative)
The construction of the Enigma wasn't really the problem. The Enigma had been in use since the early 30s and the Poles knew exactly how they worked, and later shared that with the Allies as war grew closer and Poland was invaded. Decoding a message required knowing the settings used. At Bletchley Park they built "bombes" (originally following a Polish design) that could run decodes automatically hundreds of times faster than a real Enigma to try out the huge number of possible initial settings.
Actually a great deal of their success in decoding was due to sloppy methods used by the Germans. Having messages begin in a predictable way was a "crib" that enabled good guesses to be made of the settings. And even more directly, capturing code books with schedules of code settings, as was done several times, (but not by the Americans as was depicted in U571). If the Germans had used the Enigmas with due care they never would have been cracked.
However, it's rarely noted that the Germans were almost as good at decoding Allied signals. There's very little written about that, but I have seen notes that they could read just about any Royal Navy code, for instance.
Re:What's the point? (Score:1, Informative)
Your wrongness is astounding. The fact that you were moderated up to 4 is proof that the moderation system has finally failed. I'll never read the comments on slashdot again. But I will fix this final error.
crypt(1), the file 'encryption' utility is based on a simplified Enigma. crypt(3), the password hash with an 8 character limit that can be run 100,000 times a second on a modern machine, always used DES. Modern Unixes use an md5 or blowfish based hash that doesn't have an arbitrary length limit and is designed to be much slower. (and has variable round count and a larger salt space).
Re:This is an interesting... (Score:2, Informative)
Tony Sale [codesandciphers.org.uk] the expert who rebuilt Colossus has also created a Virtual Bletchley Park [codesandciphers.org.uk] part of his website which includes a Virtual Colossus [codesandciphers.org.uk] that you can run via the web. However it is recommended to read the instructions (PDF) first! [codesandciphers.org.uk].
Re:Level of difficulty (Score:1, Informative)
Captured codebooks and poorly chosen keys (like the modern-day "password") really led to the compromise of the system as-implemented, not a compromise of the machine itself.
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, his wrongness was very subtle. First of all, he may very well have read somewhere that crypt(3) was based on enigma. That is all he claimed, isn't it? (I guess careful reading of posts isn't required on SlashDot either, not even by people who are anal about accuracy.)
Still, he did manage to pick out something called "crypt" as having been based on Enigma. My guess is that he uses Linux. His Linux distro probably no longer comes with a crypt utility (I ran into a problem with this recently and had to use this [arl.mil] instead). Having no crypt utility, and thus no man page for a crypt utility, it's hard to remember that the crypt utility used to be crypt(1). Perhaps he just assumed that some code which was once a separate program called crypt has since been library-ized, keeping the same man page location?
Re:Here's my Electronic Enigma Machine (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly this module has been marked for deprecation in python 2.3, though it is still there. I found the module very useful for some things --- a simple, light weight encryption can be a handy thing. Everyone knows that it is weak encryption these days though... but still useful, in my opinion.
I donno.. (Score:4, Informative)
Steve is smart, dont get me wrong, and did a lot of cool things ( yes i remember back then too, or even earlier with Popular Electronics.... ) but Steve had much more modern chips to work with, and used databooks for 'ideas' far too often..
Woz had to come up with the stuff from scratch...
A more astounding wrongness. (Score:2, Informative)
UNIX, and by implecation the encryption of passwords in
I was actualy USING Unix version 7 when the adoption of DES as a standard was being debated. My Version 7 UNIX manuals (all two volumes) are boxed away somewhere. I recall a warning in the manual about the enigma based crypt having known weakness. My understanding was that this same algorithm was used for the
Re:Enigma worked by looking like nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
Er.. 256,000 bytes is less than 256Kb - you can fit almost 3000 of them on a CD. Keys are supposed to be as random as possible - if it compresses significantly its not random (listen (cat to
Enigma decrypt (Score:5, Informative)
Decoding was also made easier by knowing part of the content of the message. Loyal Nazis were always fond of closing their encrypted messages with a hearty "Heil Hitler" which of course aided the British immensely.
And the real irony (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Enigma cracking: Circa 2004 (Score:3, Informative)
Not quite true - the US did supply a good number of the Bombes used for determing the steckers and wheel settings.
What made the Enigma easy to crack was that the signals through the rotors were reflected - which greatly limited the encoding space.
What the Poles did in cracking the Enigma was nothing compared to what Friedman did in cracking Japan's "Purple Code". The Poles knew how the Enigma was built, Friedman had to deduce how the "Purple" box worked.
I have an Enigma-E - works great (Score:4, Informative)