not coding for accessibility strikes again
"Sorry, but it appears your browser does not support some of the advanced 3D transforms required for Virtual Lorenz to display correctly"
Have a go with this WW2 German Lorenz cipher machine – in your browser
The National Museum of Computing has put an emulation of an "unbreakable" Second World War German cipher machine online for world+dog to admire. The Virtual Lorenz machine has been launched in honour of WW2 codebreaker Bill Tutte, the man who broke the crypto used in the twelve-rotor cipher machine. As The National Museum of …
-
-
This post has been deleted by its author
-
-
Monday 15th May 2017 13:33 GMT werdsmith
Re: Enigma, the cipher famously cracked by Tutte's colleague Alan Turing
Engima had to be constantly cracked again and again, the different versions of it for each arm of the military, the mods that they made to it, stecker boards, extra reel etc. At one point during the war Bletchley were unable to decode naval enigma for months on end until they had another breakthrough (crucial for transatlantic supplies). It wasn't just a one off thing, it was an ongoing battle.
Plus they were dealing with a huge comms network, thousands of message per day from a network of listening posts into a central industrial scale operation, processing all the mundane data looking for important, useful stuff. Deciphering one of the early commercial Enigmas was only the first step, an important one though.
-
Monday 15th May 2017 13:59 GMT Primus Secundus Tertius
Re: Enigma, the cipher famously cracked by Tutte's colleague Alan Turing
But Turing wanted Colossus built to crack the Lorenz machine traffic on a large scale in a timely way.
The Enigma traffic was handled by one or more of The Bombe, an electromechanical beast.
Both machines used continuous loops of paper tape in the absence of computer memories.
-
Monday 15th May 2017 14:34 GMT werdsmith
Re: Enigma, the cipher famously cracked by Tutte's colleague Alan Turing
"One or more"
There were 155 Bombes operating by 1945, most at Bletchley and the rest at out-stations in case Bletchley was attacked. There were also US Naval versions of the Bombe at Eastcote.
The Bombe used rotary reel positions and patch cables rather than paper reel.
-
Monday 15th May 2017 14:36 GMT Tom 7
Re: Enigma, the cipher famously cracked by Tutte's colleague Alan Turing
Primus Secundus Tertius
As I understand it the Bombe emulated the Lorenz machine and ran through various encodings to rapidly find settings that looked like they might be the ones used to encode the message and then these were tried in Colossus.
-
Monday 15th May 2017 16:23 GMT Primus Secundus Tertius
Re: Enigma, the cipher famously cracked by Tutte's colleague Alan Turing
@Tom 7
It was Colossus that emulated the Lorenz machine; the Bombe emulated the Enigma machine. If I have correctly understood the tour guides at Bletchley and TNMOC, the aim of both machines was to find the rotor settings, i.e. the crypto key.
This was done by testing "cribs": guesses at typical message headings, date and time, etc. Colossus/Bombe used two paper tapes, one with the encrypted message and the other with the crib. C/B tested many, many key settings and displacements of the crib from the start of the message.
The original Enigma message was then transcribed on a Typex machine, a British "Enigma" modified to mimic the original Enigma. As pointed out above, there were numerous variations of the Enigma.
Equally, there was a pseudo-Lorenz machhine. The Lorenz machine was a weighty beast, fit only for a headquarters role. The Enigma was portable.
-
Monday 15th May 2017 17:54 GMT Andy Taylor
Re: Enigma, the cipher famously cracked by Tutte's colleague Alan Turing
The Bombe machines didn't use paper tape and Colossus only has one tape containing the encrypted message (although each machine had 2 tape readers to speed up change overs).
There was a machine which used 2 tapes, one for the key stream and the other for the cypher text. Its name was Heath Robinson and it was the the machine that inspired Tommy Flowers to design Colossus.
You can see rebuilds of Colossus, Heath Robinson and the "pseudo-Lorenz" AKA Tunny machine at TNMOC.
-
-
-
-
-
Tuesday 16th May 2017 11:02 GMT Tom 7
Re: 3D Simulation
re screw slots. I wouldnt bet on that - I've seen heavy machinery where that happens. Some watchmakers do it to.You can either make sure its engineered like that* or put small spacers at the bottom of the hole.
*Some modern machines will always start tapping the holes at the same angle and the screws from batches can be similar enough to achieve that Anal Retentive look.
-
-
-
-
Tuesday 16th May 2017 10:07 GMT phuzz
Re: Timely
Unfortunately I don't believe this simulation has an 'output via morsecode capslock' setting for the more paranoid among us...
(PS, have you thought about reading the Baroque Cycle after you're done with Cryptonomicon? You'll recognise some of the names...)
-
-
Monday 15th May 2017 16:08 GMT Mike 16
Strange Bedfellows
I am reminded that the first time I saw images of the Lorenz machine, I was struck by the resemblance (that is, identical appearance) of the "range selectors" to those on Teletype(tm) machines of the roughly 1928-1960 era. Later I found out that Teletype had an arrangement with Kleinschmidt to manufacture in Europe, and that factory presumably did some work for "competitors" during the recent unpleasantness.
OTOH, a friend who worked in sorting U.S. Navy goods for disposal as surplus, after the end of hostilities, ran across boxes of power resistors manufactured by Siemens and having a "received and inspected" stamp of 1944 or so. "Business is Business".
-
Monday 15th May 2017 17:13 GMT Cynic_999
Re: Strange Bedfellows
"Business is Business".
Well of course it is. Do you believe that no British companies are selling or buying product to/from countries that we are or have recently fought against? Only trade in military supplies is usually banned, and general purpose goods and goods that have a civilian application are rarely prevented.
-
-
Monday 15th May 2017 17:26 GMT Shindles
Misunderstandings
What I gather from the posts is that most people have an incomplete understanding of Enigma and Lorenz. Can I suggest that a visit to The National Museum of Computing would help clarify the differences and the roles of Turing, Tutte, Newman, Tester and other key players, and also the use of the Bombe and Colossus.
-
Tuesday 16th May 2017 00:17 GMT Michael Hoffmann
My grandfather regaled me with stories about his work with the "Enigmas" during WW2. How fast he was with them, how uncrackable they were.
I wonder if it's a blessing in disguise that he passed before Ultra was declassified, so he never found out that (accounting for the above-mentioned cat&mouse game) for the most part the Allies (and therefore to a certain extent the Soviets) were reading over his shoulder.
-
Tuesday 16th May 2017 13:57 GMT Antron Argaiv
Belated Mothers' Day Trivia:
Mum was from a prominent Boston family and joined up as a US Navy WAVE (officer) and spent the war in charge of "a room full of girls decoding messages" at Nebraska Ave in Washington. She alone had say over who could enter this room, and once let it slip that her job was to decrypt the messages that "the girls" couldn't.
She never talked much about it, but there were two books in her library about Enigma. Sadly, she died before the bulk of it came out, and we never grilled her about exactly what she did. She does have a Unit Commendation ribbon, so I'm pretty sure she was decoding "their" messages, as opposed to ours.
She took up Braille transcription at 50, and never failed to do the crossword in the morning. Used to sing the alphabet song...backwards, to me and my brother.
-
-
Tuesday 16th May 2017 05:32 GMT aberglas
The NSA man did not understand enigma
The NSA had a real enigma at the RSA show this year. NSA man was showing how people could encrypt a short message and then decrypt it. So I asked him, pointedly, how this could possibly work because there was not Encrypt/Decrypt lever. Just double encrypted to produce the plain text. Just got a blank look.
[The way this works is extremely clever for a mechanical machine, but turned out to be its fatal flaw. It is central to the whole story.]
Biting the hand that feeds IT
