The Enigma Enigma
Discussion
Evangelion said:
One of my dafter friends has just asked me,
"If Alan Turing and few hundred other brainiacs and the first computer cracked the German Enigma code, could one expert and a family computer from PC World beat it in half the time?"
How does he expect me to know?
Discuss.
Just say yes and tell them it's their round at the bar."If Alan Turing and few hundred other brainiacs and the first computer cracked the German Enigma code, could one expert and a family computer from PC World beat it in half the time?"
How does he expect me to know?
Discuss.
Goaty Bill 2 said:
Surely the code was properly "cracked" by dint of having captured Enigma machines to study, and Turing's machine 'simply' sped up the decrypting of encoded messages?
Exactly. One expert (maths expert? code expert?) and a Macbook Pro is not going to crack an Enigma code, without first knowing how it works. For that you need an Enigma machine and the knowledge of how it works. Alan Turing didn't build a computer to crack the code; it was built to run all the calculation required to decrypt the code.So no, an expert and a MacBook wouldn't be able to crack the code. However, if you fed the decryption programme into the Mac, it would probably be able to decipher transcripts in a matter of seconds, if not instantaneously, compared to many hours using the valve computers during the war.
This is a good video on Enigma;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2_Q9FoD-oQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4V2bpZlqx8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2_Q9FoD-oQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4V2bpZlqx8
jmorgan said:
It was lots of things that went into cracking it, probably should be up there as well was German hubris.
Often ignored or glossed over is the contribution by Polish mathematicians The Breaking of Enigma by the Polish MathematiciansPeople massively under estimate how complex these codes were, and how powerful the machines built to break them were.
People assume a modest modern PC will crack it in milliseconds, because modern computers are so much faster, but it's not actually true.
There is a massive difference between hardware purpose built to do very specific calculations, and general purpose processors using software to do the same job.
There was a project a decade ago to break some unbroken codes, it took hundreds of computers working round the clock for weeks, and they could only crack 2 of the 3.
The final code was actually cracked by a couple of people working alone doing a lot of historical research. The reason for this is, the method used for breaking codes was a known plain text attack, this means before they started a run, they would first do some investigation to try and figure where a crib could fit into the message, thanks to a vulnerability in the lorenz cipher and a lot of research and work to know what some of the content of certain messages were likely to be, they were often able to get this right with a relatively small number of tries, and the same codes were used to many messages, so breaking one, meant you could decode hundreds more.
The method used to break the codes was not all that sophisticated by modern standards, and more recent attempts have just used software to emulate that process that was known to work, with a few enhancements, so it's still not that quick.
If there was an value in it, it would almost certainly be possible for someone to write software that could crack the code far more efficiently, well enough to make a cipher text only attack a realistic prospect. Or someone might be able to discover further vulnerabilities.
As things stand only relatively unsophisticated software is available, which on a modern PC would be quicker than the old code breakers, but not by any huge order of magnitude.
When you start to see how difficult it is to break 75 year old encryption technology, you might just get a glimpse of how big an inconceivable then numbers in modern cryptography really are.
People assume a modest modern PC will crack it in milliseconds, because modern computers are so much faster, but it's not actually true.
There is a massive difference between hardware purpose built to do very specific calculations, and general purpose processors using software to do the same job.
There was a project a decade ago to break some unbroken codes, it took hundreds of computers working round the clock for weeks, and they could only crack 2 of the 3.
The final code was actually cracked by a couple of people working alone doing a lot of historical research. The reason for this is, the method used for breaking codes was a known plain text attack, this means before they started a run, they would first do some investigation to try and figure where a crib could fit into the message, thanks to a vulnerability in the lorenz cipher and a lot of research and work to know what some of the content of certain messages were likely to be, they were often able to get this right with a relatively small number of tries, and the same codes were used to many messages, so breaking one, meant you could decode hundreds more.
The method used to break the codes was not all that sophisticated by modern standards, and more recent attempts have just used software to emulate that process that was known to work, with a few enhancements, so it's still not that quick.
If there was an value in it, it would almost certainly be possible for someone to write software that could crack the code far more efficiently, well enough to make a cipher text only attack a realistic prospect. Or someone might be able to discover further vulnerabilities.
As things stand only relatively unsophisticated software is available, which on a modern PC would be quicker than the old code breakers, but not by any huge order of magnitude.
When you start to see how difficult it is to break 75 year old encryption technology, you might just get a glimpse of how big an inconceivable then numbers in modern cryptography really are.
ging84 said:
People massively under estimate how complex these codes were, and how powerful the machines built to break them were.
People assume a modest modern PC will crack it in milliseconds, because modern computers are so much faster, but it's not actually true.
There is a massive difference between hardware purpose built to do very specific calculations, and general purpose processors using software to do the same job.
When I'm back on a PC I'll link a very interesting (well, it was to me) YouTube video about password cracking. Not on a modest pc, mind, but it's staggering how quickly it can be done using graphics card processors.People assume a modest modern PC will crack it in milliseconds, because modern computers are so much faster, but it's not actually true.
There is a massive difference between hardware purpose built to do very specific calculations, and general purpose processors using software to do the same job.
https://youtu.be/7U-RbOKanYs this one, hopefully the link works.
Edited by xRIEx on Saturday 30th July 13:17
Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff