![]() The French had access to Enigma plans but felt that it was impopssible to crack Enigma so they handed all their data to the Poleish intelligence service (Burio Szyfrow)and siad good luck. These may or may not be crackable, depending on how paranoid the commanders were.Īctualy, if the Poles hadn't been REALLY proactive about truing to break the German Enigma we (the Allies) would have been really fucked. It is also likely that some units within the German military adopted their own "extra secure" practices when using the Enigma system internally. The groups that spirited high-ranking Germans to South America and other "secure" locations must have had a communication system that the Allies had not yet deciphered, as they must have been able to operate over extremely large distances very quickly, making the use of radio a certainty. The possibility exists that certain units may have used non-standard Enigma codes, but if that is the case, those codes will NOT be broken by this effort. (The number of arrangements you would need to test increases with the factorial of the number of ways the cogs could be designed, as well as the factorial of the number of ways the cogs could be inserted into the machine.) These would not have been crackable - and would likely not be crackable today, if non-standard enough. Since the cogs were designed to be swappable, non-standard configurations would have been possible. This only allows you to crack messages which use the same prng for initialization and identical cogs. By having the same message sent twice without change and without a prior reset, it was possible to overlay the two messages and thereby infer virtually everything else. ![]() Because a machine had already been recovered, Turing knew what the cogs were, just not where they should be in relation to each other. The one event that turned Enigma transparent was the re-transmission of a message without the cogs being randomized first. The encryption mechanism itself was damn good and, if used correctly each time, every time, it would have been horribly difficult for the Bletchley Park team to break. The Enigma suffered from numerous weaknesses - almost all of them operator error. The machine used by Alan Turing (Colossus) was massively parallel and highly optimized for the task - so much so that it is actually able to compute something like ten times as many keys per second as a modern Pentium 4 using the same algorithm. The full Enigma code is extremely difficult to break. It was not "broken" in the purist sense of the term, in that there is no shorter method of cracking the messages other than by brute-force. The Enigma code was broken only in the trivial sense that it was possible to brute-force decrypt the messages, once the algorithm, prng and seed value were known. In order to make it more certain, the codebreakers even asked the front-line forces to do apparently bizarre things, just so they'd have a keyword they could look for in the subsequent reports. I imagine the "all Ls" scenario was one of the easier guesses. but that was enough of a hint that when combined with a knowledge of human behavior gave the cryptanalysts reason to assume it was all Ls and see if they could find key settings that would produce the ciphertext from that input.Įven at the height of Bletchley Park's codebreaking efficiency, nearly every day's break came down to some clever guess of that sort. Without knowing the actual story, I'd guess that the message probably wasn't all that long, and the math would probably predict only a few more Ls than normal. There's no mathematical guarantee that it would contain all Ls, but a sufficiently long ciphertext message with no Ls in the output would've indicated that, with high probability, there were an unusually large number of Ls in the input. ![]() To be precise, the message was slightly more likely to have consisted entirely of the letter L. ![]() Since the crib relied on the Enigma's inability to encode a letter to itself, the received message must have consisted entirely of the letter L.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |