

Bletchley Park archive to go online - sp332
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10239623

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minimax
If you are ever visiting London you should try and make a trip out to
Bletchley Park. It's really easy. You can take a London Midlands train from
London Euston to the Bletchley station and then walk a short distance to the
park. I did it myself this summer and it was an immensely rewarding
experience. Standing outside the cottage where Turing broke Enigma sent
shivers down my spine.

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ElliotH
If you live in the UK and you haven't been to Bletchley Park yet then you
really should go. Seeing a Colossus running is an amazing thing that really
isn't' captured by video.

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alextingle
Does anyone else feel that the recent antics of GCHQ have tarnished the legacy
of Bletchley Park's wartime efforts?

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louthy
It just shows we've been up to the same tricks for years ;)

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alextingle
Well, no. I don't think that spying on Hitler is morally equivalent to
indiscriminately spying on your own people.

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adestefan
Which is funny because they did indiscriminately spy on their own people while
they were busy spying on Hitler.

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alextingle
Really? Can you elaborate?

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chimeracoder
This is incredibly, incredibly exciting for me.

A friend and I actually just finished writing a program that simulates the
process of cracking a Geheimschreiber[0] (one of the successors to the Enigma
machine), which was cracked at Bletchley Park.

There are several ways to break the encryption today, especially given the
available computing power. However, we happened to discover a technique that
requires _no_ probabilistic guessing or brute forcing (this is unusual for
crypto cracking - usually at least a _bit_ [1] of guessing is required). The
technique works as long as a sufficient number of ciphertexts are observed,
and this threshold is a very small number.

For me, it'll be exciting to see if there is any more information on the
technique that they used. (From digging around so far, I've been able to find
a small bit of information about the device itself from a modern perspective,
but none about what they actually did at the time).

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geheimschreiber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geheimschreiber)

[1] No pun intended

~~~
willvarfar
:) :) :) more details on your approach please! Fascinating! Any papers or blog
posts?

~~~
chimeracoder
Soon!

We've finished the program itself - it works, all the tests pass, etc. We just
haven't had time to actually write an explanation of our process yet. We were
meaning to do that this week, but we both have major deadlines for school
today (speaking of which, I need to get back to work).

I don't want to promise any particular date, but hopefully we can get to this
soon - we'll be sure to post it here once we've written it.

If you want, I can send you an email when it's done if you give me your
contact info. :)

