Friday, March 03, 2006



Cracking Enigma 63 years on

This is cool: an online project is attempting to crack three leftover WWII Enigma messages. The messages were encrypted on the M4 four-rotor Enigma in 1942, and never decoded. They were published in a cryptography journal in 1995, and now a German enthusiast has set up a distributed computing project to crack them. They've already done one, and hopefully they'll get the other two soon.

Posted by Idiot/Savant at 3/03/2006 10:23:00 AM

4 comments:

I believe the cypher that was never cracked belonged to the Gestapo, even though the Gestapo never moved to four rotor enigma their meticulous attention to cypher security and extensive use of phone and teleprinters, all of which denied the Allies regualr "cribs."

There are several good books on Enigma, but one of the best I have read in terms of integrating the intelligence war into an operational history is the late Clay Blair's two volume history of the U-Boat war, called "Hitlers U-Boat War: Part 1 The Hunters" and "Part 2: The Hunted."

It seems to me Mr. Blair was clearly in failing health towards the end of his second volume, with an increasingly discordant and strident anti-British tone creeping into his writing but its still the best damn read on the U-Boat war and enigma yet published.

 Posted by Sanctuary : 3/03/2006 03:55:00 PM

at the time of his death Turing was silver-plating spoons in his bedroom using a process that involved cyanide

Why?

 Posted by Idiot/Savant : 3/03/2006 04:19:00 PM

He'd found instructions on the Internet and made the fatal mistake of trying them out.

 Posted by Rich : 3/03/2006 07:19:00 PM

Why silver-plating spoons? He was an eccentric geek!

That's what I'd figured; I was wondering if there was any deeper reason.

 Posted by Idiot/Savant : 3/06/2006 04:24:00 PM

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