[HN Gopher] Unbroken Enigma Message
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Unbroken Enigma Message
Author : akakievich
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-02-01 19:20 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (enigma.hoerenberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (enigma.hoerenberg.com)
| haram_masala wrote:
| "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
| _Microft wrote:
| "Many resources / allied forces / waste on cracking / advert
| messages / That bemuses / Burma Shave", see [0] for context.
| This was not an actual Burma Shave advertisement of course.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma-Shave
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The Dulles Airport Access road had signs "This road is only /
| For airport users / Don't risk a ticket / From our police
| cruisers" and I always wanted to put up a 5th sign that said
| "Burma Shave" but never had the guts to go through with it.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Usually the rhyme scheme is ABCB:
| https://www.printmag.com/post/the-morbid-roadside-ad-
| poetry-...
|
| I'll submit this: Let Turing try to
| read our mail Our ciphertext will never fail.
| German-Shave.
| _Microft wrote:
| Yours sounds good. I crafted mine according to the pattern
| in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma-
| Shave#/media/File:BurmaS... and tried to rhyme _bemuses_ on
| _resources_ and _forces_ with questionable success.
|
| The article you linked to is nice and was never submitted
| here before. I hope you do not mind that I just did that.
| nitrogen wrote:
| The page mentions Enigma@Home. How much computation would be
| required to brute force check all Enigma keys?
|
| _Edit:_ found this on Wikipedia: "the military Enigma has
| 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 different settings (nearly 159
| quintillion or about 67 bits)"
| imglorp wrote:
| That's not how it's been broken historically. Breakers
| leveraged operational errors like the enemy reusing the same
| key for multiple messages or having messages with standard
| formats.
| killion wrote:
| So it looks like there is only one unbroken message left, the
| others have been broken between 2012-2017. The Enigma@Home
| project appears to be on hold while they look at different ways
| of solving. Am I understanding this correctly?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Help crack it with unused CPU cycles and Enigma@Home (uses the
| BOINC platform):
|
| http://www.enigmaathome.net/
| emsal wrote:
| Tangent, but Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson[1] is a good novel
| that touches on WWII cryptography topics really well, going
| decently mathematically deep into the mechanics of how they work.
| I'm about 75% of the way through.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
| odiroot wrote:
| The audiobook narrated by the author is just hilarious.
|
| I was alternating reading with listening for fun.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| A great book. If you want to explorer some of the same themes I
| recommend his Baroque cycle, which carries on with other
| characters that are the current charecters distant ancestors.
| anonymousisme wrote:
| I read it again last year and picked up on a few things that
| had slipped past my understanding the first time around. I had
| originally assumed that the present day Enoch Root was the
| child of Bobby's Nordic girlfriend, but it was obviously not
| the case upon my second reading. A few web searches revealed
| the supernatural nature of Root.
|
| I always wondered if Stephenson chose the name "Enoch Root" on
| a dare, or maybe he has some other story. It's probably
| something related to an "Enterprise NOC Root" computer account.
| [deleted]
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Enoch is a character in multiple biblical stories:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_(ancestor_of_Noah)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_(son_of_Cain)
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| Serendipitous, I'm also about 75% of the way through!
|
| It's one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. Perhaps
| the most.
|
| I very highly recommend it, though I imagine much of HN's
| audience has done so or is at least aware of it.
| 3001 wrote:
| Please reply your take when you are 99% of the way through
| killion wrote:
| I had the exact same thought. There is no feeling like the
| frustration of a disappointing ending after being engrossed
| in a Neal Stephenson book.
|
| When they were paper books at least you could throw them
| across the room. Now that would break my phone.
| ridruejo wrote:
| Share your frustration. This one did not disappoint me
| though
| [deleted]
| rjknight wrote:
| I'm also 75% of the way through... my fourth read-through.
| It's notable how my opinion of the major characters changes
| each time I read it.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Is there any possibility the cyphertext is _wrong_? Either
| generated with a bug, someone hit the wheel halfway through,
| copied down wrong, etc? Is there a checksum that authenticates
| this as a valid cyphertext?
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| A common assumption about this message has long been that some
| sort of mistake was made somewhere, probably not in the machine
| but in the setup of the machine, transcription of the
| ciphertext, etc. Some of the other very long-lasting Enigma
| messages turned out to have probably been transcribed
| incorrectly either by the original intercept operator or
| someone down the line, for example---they decode if you swap
| out certain similar letters. This is particularly likely since
| a lot of key material and other useful documents have been
| recovered post-war to help with the analysis.
|
| This particular message is particularly interesting due to its
| origin... U-534 is a German U-boat that was, unusually,
| recovered after the war. It's now a museum piece. While it was
| full of water that did a lot of damage, there were some
| documents on board that were still legible... including the
| Schlusselzettel for this message, which is basically a
| worksheet used by the radio operator to decode messages. It's
| linked to from the article, along with Dan Girard's theory of
| why this particular Schlusselzettel was filled out in an
| unusual way and missing plaintext... the radio operator at
| first made a mistake, and then realized that the message wasn't
| actually intended for (or decodable) by them, so they set it
| aside.
|
| U-534's recovered documents lead to no small number of
| interesting Enigma messages, and the linked website has a big
| focus on them. They specifically reject the claim made by some
| that U-534 had a specially modified or possibly even broken
| Enigma machine, since other messages from the boat decode
| properly.
|
| Enigma cryptanalysis is a very interesting hobby, since the
| Enigma machine is complex enough to be formidable but still
| simple enough to be amenable to human attacks. It's also a bit
| challenging from the perspective of someone used to modern
| cryptography, because the operation of the rotor machines is
| very different from modern cryptography, and because both older
| and modern writing about them uses a lot of terminology and
| methods developed at Bletchley Park that is not often used
| elsewhere---it seems to have been the culture of British
| intelligence, or at least the code-breaking type, to name
| things after inside jokes. This leads to odd things like
| Banburismus and Testery.
|
| The Enigma was not the only rotor machine in use by the Germans
| during the second world war, and not the most advanced either.
| A more complex evolution of the rotor machine concept, code
| named "Tunny" by the British, was used for fixed radio links
| (it was too large and delicate to be practical for naval
| applications), and Bletchley Park mounted a huge effort to
| decode it was well, which lead to the development of an
| electromechanical computer called Colossus. In the essay
| collection "Colossus," edited by B. Jack Copeland, authors
| contend that Colossus is a major milestone in computer history,
| more significant than the Bombe designed for Enigma messages,
| which has been largely overlooked by historians because most
| documentation on Colossus remained classified until 2000.
|
| Most interestingly, one author suggests that Colossus was an
| important precursor to the design of ENIAC which went
| uncredited because of its classified nature - but several key
| designers of ENIAC had also been designers of Colossus shortly
| before. This positions Colossus as a bit of a "missing link" in
| the development of the programmable computer, since Colossus
| was modified with limited programmable features similar to
| ENIAC's more flexible capability.
|
| The 1970 speculative computer film "Colossus" seems to have
| been an amusing coincidence as knowledge of Colossus was still
| almost entirely classified at the time.
| Snild wrote:
| (I'm definitely not an expert. Grains of salt encouraged.)
|
| There were no checksums, so incorrect ciphertext is possible.
|
| But Enigma is a stream cipher, so if there was a missing
| character or someone bumped the wheel halfway through, it
| should still be possible to find two separate solutions that
| produce the plaintext before and after the error, respectively.
| zepatrik wrote:
| That's what I first thought as well... But I guess the machines
| themselves were accurate enough. I mean, if that could happen
| it would have happened on a daly basis.
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(page generated 2021-02-01 23:00 UTC)