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Flaw in the Enigma Code - Numberphile

Numberphile

4.7M subscribers • 28 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2013 to 2025.
  • Presented by Dr James Grime

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

5.4M views13 years ago4 recommendations

SecurityHistory and cultureCryptographyHistory of computing

Dr James Grime explains the fundamental design flaw in the Enigma machine that allowed Allied codebreakers to crack Nazi messages.

The flaw which allowed the Allies to break the Nazi Enigma code. More links & stuff in full description below ↓↓↓ First video explaining Enigma: youtu.be/G2_Q9FoD-oQ Extra footage: youtu.be/BdrrJ7qd4HA Brown papers on ebay: bit.ly/brownpapers Periodic Videos: youtube.com/periodicvideos This video features Dr James Grime discussing Enigma, the Bombe and Alan Turing. James' "day job" is touring with the Enigma machine - he could even visit you - see more at enigma.maths.org/content/project-officer The maths of breaking the Enigma by James Grime enigma.maths.org/content/sites/enigma.maths.org/files/maths.… NUMBERPHILE Website: numberphile.com/ Numberphile on Facebook: facebook.com/numberphile Numberphile tweets: twitter.com/numberphile Subscribe: bit.ly/Numberphile_Sub Videos by Brady Haran Patreon: patreon.com/numberphile Brady's videos subreddit: reddit.com/r/BradyHaran/ Brady's latest videos across all channels: bradyharanblog.com/ Sign up for (occasional) emails: eepurl.com/YdjL9 Numberphile T-Shirts: teespring.com/stores/numberphile Other merchandise: store.dftba.com/collections/numberphile

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a clear and succinct explanation of the Enigma machine's cryptographic flaw and how codebreakers exploited it.

sproketboyon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Enigma Machine: How Alan Turing Helped Break the Unbreakable Nazi Code”

Some people might like this from Numberphile which describes the flaw in the enigma machine that British code breakers used to eventually break the code. link to this video
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iClaudiusXon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Forthcoming book seeks to visualise, locate and expose many numbers stations”

In this case, a more relevant example from World War II might be the exploitation of flaws in the Enigma machine, namely: 1) the re-use of common phrases in weather reports, and 2) the fact that a letter could not be encoded as itself in the ciphertext, providing a mechanism of contradiction that drastically sped up elimination of possible settings link Numberphile gives a nice, succinct explanation link to this video
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DarkmSparkson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud”

none of it is "brute force", GNFS is a process that rapidly excludes numbers from the search space that cannot be the answer, in principle similar to the way they broke enigma. numberphile has a great video on that one link to this video Also, taking the OP as a "worse case", afaik: 512bit = $8 so 1024 = 8^2 = $64 2048 = 8^2^2 = $4,096 4096 = 8^2^2 = $16,777,216 noting $8 for 512 seems very expensive to me.
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robaatoon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Encryption made for police and military radios may be easily cracked”

There's the entertaining bit in the film The Imitation Game (the breaking of Enigma code by Alan Turing) where they realised that a weakness was the daily weather report always containing the words "weatherreport" and "heil bloody hitler" (with obvious addition!) link or longer version: link Also a more proper explanation: link to this video
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