[HN Gopher] How did the Enigma Machine work? (2021) [video]
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How did the Enigma Machine work? (2021) [video]
Author : vishnuharidas
Score : 39 points
Date : 2022-04-26 19:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| implements wrote:
| It's worth implementing a basic Enigma in whatever language
| you're happy with - it's a tiny bit of code and you end up with a
| great sense of satisfaction in completely understanding how they
| work, wrinkles (1) and all.
|
| (1) Lamps light on the key downstroke, rotors move on the
| upstroke. Rotors advance their neighbours from different
| positions, sometimes from two positions, etc.
| vha3 wrote:
| In case seeing it in software helps anyone else, here is some C
| which implements an Enigma machine:
| https://vanhunteradams.com/Enigma/Enigma.html
| DantesKite wrote:
| I just finished watching the Imitation Game and while it
| obviously took artistic license with the story, I never realized
| just how high the stakes were during WWII. Turing and his team
| were incredible.
| legitster wrote:
| > took artistic license with the story
|
| This is an understatement. It was well enough as a movie, but I
| think you will come away with a worse understanding of Turing
| and Bletchley Park than if you had never watched it. I cannot
| say enough about how it mischaracterized Turing's work, his
| personality, the nature of the codebreaking endeavors, or the
| contribution of others.
| legitster wrote:
| While the Enigma Machine is truly fascinating, we largely only
| know about it because it failed.
|
| Meanwhile, the Allies had multiple encryption technologies
| fielded during the war that were far superior:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGABA
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGTOT
|
| But that's only part of the story - the allies were far more
| robust operationally. The Nazis were terrible at intelligence and
| counterintelligence (something to do with the subtlety required).
| And because they didn't take spying or intelligence seriously,
| they never "pentested" their own processes very well. They were
| fairly happy enough to create the Enigma machine and use it
| everywhere.
|
| Meanwhile, the allies were much more careful about what sort of
| encryption was used in each circumstance, and much more cautious
| about how much information (even encrypted) they made available
| for their enemy to intercept.
|
| If you really want to get into the details of how and why the
| Enigma was a failure, I strongly recommend _Seizing the Enigma_
| by David Kahn. It does an excellent job of combining the
| technical details of the Enigma codebreaking with the overall
| story of naval intelligence.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I always thought it was such an elegant design. Shame (or
| fortunate rather) that the Allies were able to break it so
| quickly.
| thatswrong0 wrote:
| (Gross oversimplification but..) One seemingly innocuous bug
| deep in the encryption "library", that no letter could map to
| itself, plus a bit of social "engineering" in taking advantage
| of the fact that messages often included the same text (e.g.
| "heil hitler") often in the same position, with a smattering of
| German complacency and arrogance assuming that their machine
| was uncrackable.
|
| Pretty funny that the lessons learned here are still relevant
| to this day.
| abraae wrote:
| My bank disallows "simple" pin codes like 1234, 1111, etc.
|
| This even further reduces the difficulty of guessing pin
| codes.
| legitster wrote:
| Even after it was "broken", it took a lot of work to decrypt -
| sometimes allies were months the German messages.
| tialaramex wrote:
| The German assumption, throughout the war, was that Enigma
| _could_ be cracked but it was probably too hard so the Allies
| would not try. You can see that not all of the German Military
| was as easily sold on this belief, because some forces stayed
| with a relatively basic machine while at the end the U-Boats
| were using a four rotor machine and much stricter rules to
| reduce attack surface. Ironically they were undone by their
| need to transmit and receive very succinct messages in order to
| spend less time on the surface where they were vulnerable.
|
| Germany was in particular unaware that Poland - understandably
| nervous of an increasingly combative Germany years before the
| war started - had cracked Enigma when it was a commercial
| system in the 1930s. This knowledge was transmitted to the
| British in 1939, and the cryptanalytic team who did it began
| leaving Warsaw before (inevitably) Germany invaded in
| September.
|
| There's a small memorial to the Polish code breakers at
| Bletchley Park, it's not exactly on the main tour, so if you
| care ask someone when you're there to tell you where. People
| who were there suggest it made maybe 12 months difference,
| specifically to Enigma (Bletchley Park did other less famous
| cryptographic work) which is a pretty significant difference.
|
| Enigma is interesting because it's so famous and yet it's
| completely the wrong design, and this is exactly the era when
| people stop doing that. The Colossus computer, also at
| Bletchley park, is to break the Lorenz cipher _not_ Enigma,
| because Lorenz is a much more "normal" design to us today.
| It's a Vernam stream cipher, it encrypts _bit streams_ and it
| merely so happens that those bit streams are Morse code. You
| could perhaps say Lorenz is a (distant) ancestor of, say,
| ChaCha20.
|
| In contrast Enigma looks like cryptography from previous
| centuries, it encrypts symbols, one symbol in -> one encrypted
| symbol out. No letter on your Engima machine's keyboard
| representing the symbol you wanted? Say it in words or don't
| encrypt it. This is in some ways more practical (Enigma was
| actually used with radio traffic, but in principle you could
| send letters, or encrypt your diary, or whatever) but in
| cryptographic terms it's a complete nightmare.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| Super interesting, thanks! This is also a good companion video --
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzWB5jL5RX0 -- about the
| feasibility of cracking Enigma "in 2021" i.e. using computational
| power available to us today.
|
| TLDW & AFAIK: it's crackable (just as it was back then, using a
| bag of approaches & heuristics), but you still couldn't plain
| brute force an encrypted message today if you didn't have any
| portion of the plain text, the Enigma was using 10 plugboard
| pairs, etc.
|
| Also see https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/33631
| rkagerer wrote:
| I had a chance to play on one many years ago.
|
| Many are in museums behind glass, but a private collector brought
| one to a bunker museum I volunteered at, I asked if I could try
| it out and he obliged.
|
| In Maryland at the NSA's National Cryptologic Museum in Fort
| Meade visitors can try their hand at using one to encipher and
| decipher messages (per Wikipedia).
| rpmuller wrote:
| The National Cryptologic Museum is well worth visiting for the
| Enigma Machines alone. It's free to get in, right next to NSA
| headquarters, but you don't need a visitors pass or to go
| through a guard station. When I was there they had ~4 Enigma
| Machines available to look at.
| Daniel_sk wrote:
| Very good explanation and the actual mechanism is way simpler
| than I thought.
| netsharc wrote:
| Meta-commentary: Damn, that channel has lots of videos of the
| same genre and millions of views, I guess "Create 3D graphical
| reconstructions of objects and explain how they work" is a viable
| occupation...
| kristofferR wrote:
| Branch Education is another channel that does this brilliantly:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/BranchEducation/videos
| [deleted]
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