[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a binary enigma machine for manual e...
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Show HN: I made a binary enigma machine for manual encryption
Introducing the 3D Printed Binary Enigma (10 Enigma) - the ultimate
encryption and decryption device, no batteries required! Inspired
by the iconic Enigma machines of WWII, this sleek and intuitive
device lets you encode and decode messages "effortlessly". Or how
else are we going to send secure messages in the future?
Author : chjh
Score : 63 points
Date : 2024-03-27 21:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (makerworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (makerworld.com)
| lukan wrote:
| My very first (self choosen) real software project in school was
| a simulated replica of the Enigma, but it is of course way
| cooler, to have something that you can print out to actually
| physically put together.
|
| "Or how else are we going to send secure messages in the future?"
|
| And you could probably also market it as quantum secure, you
| know, there probably can't be a bitflip due to cosmic radiation
| .. (isn't this what quantum computers are doing? /s)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Early versions of unix included a crypt utility based on
| simulating an Enigma machine. It's funny to look at old man
| pages and see the warnings change from
|
| _Methods of attack on such machines are known, but not widely;
| moreover the amount of work required is likely to be large._
|
| to
|
| _Methods of attack on such machines are widely known, thus
| crypt provides minimal security._
| eichin wrote:
| In particular, CBW ("Crypt Breakers Workbench") was a popular
| curses-based decoder "game" in the late 1980s - it would
| display a block, you'd start typing known plaintext, and it
| would constraint-propagate what was possible/impossible given
| that. (IIRC it took more than one block to recover the key,
| but it would copy "known wirings" to later pages.) That
| definitely pushed it into "widely known" and relatively low
| effort (IIRC crypt(1) is a 256-element rotor, not a
| 26-element one like actual Enigma; I vaguely recall the
| symmetry actually made it cryptographically worse :-)
| Someone wrote:
| http://www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/cbw.html leads to
| https://github.com/AlbertVeli/cbw, which says
|
| _"This git repository is not meant to improve upon cbw,
| only make it compile on modern UNIX-like systems, like OS
| X, FreeBSD and GNU /Linux.
|
| Current status: Compiling but crashing. You are welcome to
| help out ;-)"_
|
| I didn't check whether
| ftp://ftp.isc.org/usenet/comp.sources.unix/volume10/cbw/
| still exists. It could have the original sources.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Not only is it cool, it's cute. Made me smile. Thanks for this
| gorgeous little thang.
| garyiskidding wrote:
| really cool project..!
| robertclaus wrote:
| I love the write-up. Very entertaining.
|
| "it's the perfect blend of simplicity and security for modern
| communication" "experience encryption like never before!"
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| The original Enigma machine had a cryptographic weakness in that
| it would never encode a letter to itself (e.g. an A would never
| be encoded to an A). Luckily this seems to have been fixed for
| the binary enigma machine.
| majikandy wrote:
| I love this, my dissertation at uni was on the Enigma machine and
| I built a configurable one in software (Java) and it was
| fascinating to me that once you matched the spec of the real
| machine you got matching letter for letter encryption and
| decryption of real messages. The day my outer acceptance tests
| started working was amazing! The fact this needs no power is
| brilliant. Makes it surprising now they didn't come up with it
| being a pure mechanical version back then and relied on the
| electrical current. Would love to try this out in the flesh.
| cantrevealname wrote:
| > _Or how else are we going to send secure messages in the
| future?_
|
| That's an intriguing comment. What do you mean by that? Do you
| mean a future when governments force tech companies to install
| backdoors in all end-to-end encrypted software we use? Or when
| AGI writes all of our software, designs all hardware, and AGI
| decides that it needs to monitor all human communications. Only
| half joking.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| AGI won't monitor all human communication: only the human
| communication it deems cute enough to record and post to the
| group chat with the caption '<3 OMG they almost think they're
| AGI <3 so adorable <3 I love my humans <3 <3'
|
| Other than that it'll probably leave us alone (with occasional
| new enrichment toys when it suspects we've been alone too long)
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| If you are reading something to decide whether it's
| interesting, that's monitoring
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