whiskeytuesdayon Hacker News • Recommends
On “The Scandalous History of the Last Rotor Cipher Machine”
I would think that the recent computerphile video "Cracking Enigma In 2021" would be a good place to start. link to this video
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#enigma#cryptanalysis#mikepound
Cracking Enigma in 2021 - Computerphile
Computerphile
2.6M subscribers • 66 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 3 people: 3 on Hacker News.
- Presented by Dr. Mike Pound, University of Nottingham
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
2.9M views5 years ago3 recommendations
SecurityHistory and cultureCryptographyHistory of computing
Dr. Mike Pound demonstrates how a modern laptop can quickly crack the WWII Enigma cipher using ciphertext-only attacks.
Enigma is known as the WWII cipher, but how does it hold up in 2021? Dr Mike Pound implemented it and shows how it stacks up against his laptop. Mikes Code: bit.ly/C_Mike_enigma Cryptool v2 is here: bit.ly/C_Cryptool The original paper that Mike's attack is based off web.archive.org/web/20060720040135/http://members.fortunecit… facebook.com/computerphile twitter.com/computer_phile This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley. Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: bit.ly/nottscomputer Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. More at bradyharan.comWhy it's here
3 people recommend thisWhat people say. Recommended as a clear explanation of practical cryptanalysis and how modern computing power easily breaks historical ciphers.
gregsadetskyon Hacker News • Recommends
On “How did the Enigma Machine work? (2021) [video]”
Super interesting, thanks! This is also a good companion video -- link to this video -- about the feasibility of cracking Enigma "in 2021" i.e. using computational power available to us today. TLDW & AFAIK: it's crackable (just as it was back then, using a bag of approaches & heuristics), but you still couldn't plain brute force an encrypted message today if you didn't have any portion of the plain text, the Enigma was using 10 plugboard pairs, etc. Also see link
H8crilAon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Interview with Marian Rejewski, the first person to crack Enigma (1974) [video]”
…break all Enigma setups till 1939 because one didn't have to it yet to effectively collect intelligence. Also because they hadn't existed yet :) Enigma was actually pretty good, but it had a major design flaw: insufficient diffusion. The YouTube channel Computerphile made a good video on practical cryptanalysis of the Enigma using modern hardware: link to this video . In short, if you know what you're doing you can do ciphertext-only attacks given long enough messages and minimal knowledge about the distribution of the plaintext (their example relies only on the fact that the plaintext is in English).…
aquovaon Hacker News • Mentions
On “P1030680: Unbroken Enigma message (U534, 01 May 1945)”
An episode of Computerphile attempted to answer the question - link to this video . TL;DW: With some clever tricks, and the advantage of hindsight, it can be done reasonably quickly on a modern computer.