
Rare and hardest to crack Enigma code machine sells for $437k - LinuxBender
https://www.zdnet.com/article/rare-and-hardest-to-crack-enigma-code-machine-sells-for-437000/
======
jhallenworld
In the Boston area there is a guy who reliably attends ham radio and antique
radio swap meets (Flea at MIT, NEARC)- he always shows off his Enigma
machines. This adds tremendously to the atmosphere of these events, and I
always appreciate seeing his exhibit.

Damn Covid, these shows are all canceled for now..

~~~
djaque
The MIT flea is awesome and I've met him a few times. Definitely visit if you
get the chance.

------
chrisweekly
It's HN so most of you probably already know and love Neal Stephenson's
writing, but any time Enigma comes up I feel compelled to recommend
"Cryptonomicon", one of my all-time favorite novels in any genre.

~~~
cantrevealname
I want to love that book -- it's everything I'm interested in -- but _oh my
god_ that book is so verbose. For example, he spends 1.5 pages describing what
the clouds in the sky look like and it has nothing to do with the plot. I
tried twice to read it but gave up at halfway. It's 918 pages, but I think it
could lose at least 300 pages and still keep all the brilliant ideas. If
someone created a condensed version of it, I think the book could reach a
whole new audience.

~~~
AlisdairO
Yeah, I think a lot of that comes down to whether you enjoy his writing style.
I would read what Stephenson writes even if it's devoid of ideas, just for the
joy of the style.

For myself, the scene where he describes Randy eating breakfast in
Cryptonomican is one of my favourite passages in any book (partly because I
identify with the source material :-) ), but others have cited that to me as
an example of gross excess.

------
tpmx
So a Norwegian ex-colleague of mine randomly found a _very_ pristine Enigma
machine in the attic of his parents house (presumably left there by a
grandparent, who had likely gotten hold of it in the spring/summer of 1945,
_somehow_ ), about 13 years ago. I was a bit jealous about that find.
Apparently only 250 or so remain, altogether.

Photos here:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20070622082533/http://my.opera.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070622082533/http://my.opera.com/TMS/albums/show.dml?id=46514)

(The guy who took/posted the photos is separate from the lucky guy who found
it. Please don't bother him.)

~~~
peanutz454
"Enigma machine at Opera", so this ex-colleague of yours work at Opera the ex-
awesome browser making company?

~~~
tpmx
Yeah, we both worked there at the time. Back when it was actually awesome :).

~~~
sergiotapia
Back then (2003,2004) Opera showed me what the web could be. The tool
outshined everything else on the market. Hell, I remember loving dragonfly and
presto and it's what got me interested in web stuff. So thanks!

~~~
tpmx
That's great!

------
WalterBright
> he declared that the Allies could not possibly have deciphered his Enigma
> messages

One should always assume deciphering.

I would have used one-time pads on top of the Enigma. There weren't that many
U-boots, so it should have been workable.

~~~
extrememacaroni
Their first mistake was rolling their own crypto. Never roll your own crypto.

~~~
ThreeFx
To be fair, those days there (fortunately) wasn't really a useful
cryptographic standard to use.

------
redelbee
What do you think the present-day cryptological equivalent of the Enigma
machine and its decryption is? I’m most interested in examples of consequence
(e.g. saving lives by shortening war) rather than comparisons of technical
achievement.

~~~
upofadown
Things are quite different these days. Code makers seem to have run far in
advance of code breakers.

Since there are no major wars running, if someone did break something
significant they would save it for later.

~~~
est31
And yet I feel we are living in the golden age of signals intelligence. The
only reason to not say that is because trends point towards an even better
golden age. Already the scale of the open source stuff out there has never
existed before. And then add speculative stuff like saving encrypted content
to decrypt it later decades down the line when methods and hardware have
improved. Just a single insider can walk out with an USB stick full of the
crown jewels of a place supposed to keep secrets... Pretty sure the US
intelligence community didn't have records of basic data of each individual
living in europe in WW2 times, but they certainly do now, simply thanks to
electronic records systems collecting the data and them just having to harvest
the data fruits whether it's by hacking or other means.

~~~
eru
Mostly, yes. Though for perspective: when engaged in a hot war you tend not to
care too much about what your opponent can figure out in a few decades.

Even enigma would have been mostly good enough, if the allies had taken a few
weeks to decrypt each message.

In peace time learning old secrets is comparatively more useful.

~~~
est31
> when engaged in a hot war you tend not to care too much about what your
> opponent can figure out in a few decades.

IDK if the allies would have had a list of gay Germans from encrypted data
they collected decades prior they could have used that data for extortion.
Even if it took decades of progress, they'd have had ample time. The question
is, does collecting data now put you into a better position than not having
such collections. And the answer is maybe to yes. Even if it's just maybe it's
probably worth the investment for the DoD.

~~~
082349872349872
Did the NSDAP even bother to encrypt their little lists[1]? I'd thought they
kept them in the clear, on IBM punched cards.

For an interesting Paperclip-like connection to the founding of the BND, see:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Scherhorn#Aftermath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Scherhorn#Aftermath)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWo_3CIcTBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWo_3CIcTBQ)

------
Animats
Four rotors. Now that would tire out your fingers.

The limitation on the number of rotors is key pressure. A 3-rotor Enigma has a
huge key travel and you have to push hard. (I've had the opportunity.) The
friction between the contacts is high. That's why these machines were not
built with enough rotors to be really secure.

The next step up was the Lorenz 10-rotor machine, but that had to be
motorized. But the crypto design of that was botched, and it's easy to crack.
A real 10-rotor alphabetical Enigma-like machine without a "reflector" would
have been secure against any attacks of the period.

~~~
tialaramex
> But the crypto design of that was botched, and it's easy to crack.

This seems like it depends upon a perspective unavailable at the time.

Until June 1943 (by which point Germany has in fact lost the war though it
will fight on for a long while, the Eastern Front campaign is going terribly
and the United States is increasingly diverting resources to a "Europe First"
strategy which Germany can't conceivably overpower) the only breaks of Lorenz
at Bletchley were based on what they called depth. Multiple ciphertexts using
the same key, a fatal flaw for a cryptosystem even today.

For example a German radio operator begins encoding and transmitting an
important message, and then is interrupted by some matter, after a few minutes
they begin again but use the same key because it hasn't been impressed upon
them that they absolutely must use a fresh key each time. If they make even a
trivial typographical error the two ciphertexts will be different and that's
enough to recover the messages.

Only in July 1943 do Bletchley begin actually decrypting any messages for
which there is no depth. They do this because they have a (very primitive)
electronic codebreaking machine, something that has never before existed. This
machine is unsatisfactory in many ways but it's ludicrously faster than manual
codebreaking.

So it seems unfair to critique Lorenz based on the fact that a suitably
powerful electronic machine can break it. No such machines had ever existed
before. Plus it took several years to even conceive of how to do the attack
before the machine could be built, because of course programmable computers
didn't exist yet.

~~~
taejo
> Multiple ciphertexts using the same key, a fatal flaw for a cryptosystem
> even today.

To avoid confusing readers, one should mention that modern ciphers separate
the key, which can be reused but must be kept secret, from the initialization
vector (IV), which must not be reused but can be transmitted in the clear.

These correspond roughly to the Enigma's daily settings and per-message rotor
start positions, but AIUI the procedure for selecting and transmitting the
latter changed over the course of the war, and at times insecure even if done
according to the procedure.

~~~
stan_rogers
It was actually far worse for the Lorenz (Tunny) traffic. The wheel patterns -
the equivalent of the key in, say, AES - were changed quite infrequently early
on. The five χ-wheels (in Bletchley parlance) were only changed monthly, while
the five ψ-wheels were changed quarterly. While the two μ-wheel patterns were
changed daily, there was little consideration given to what those patterns
actually were. The χ-wheels generated the first of two sets of bit patterns to
be XORed with the plain text; the ψ-wheels generated the second set. That
would have been fine, except that the two μ-wheels together determined whether
or not the ψ-wheels advanced - μ1 advanced on every keystroke along with the
χ-wheels, μ2 would advance only if μ1 was a 1, and the ψ-wheels advanced only
if μ2 was a 1 - and bad patterns on the ψ-wheels would mean that the ψ-wheels
would be essentially frozen for extended runs of the message. What was meant
to introduce a sort of dither to make it harder to determine how the key was
being generated became the Achilles heel that highlighted the mechanism. (Not
to take anything away from Bill Tutte and the rest of the crew at all. There
was still a lot of cleverness and tedious attention to detail involved.) With
a month of life on the χ patterns and three months on ψ, depths and near-
depths on the message settings (the nonce or IV) were absolute killers. Later
on, all of the wheel patterns were changed daily, and the μ-wheel patterns
were verified for short stall lengths, but by then the machine's mechanism was
well understood, pattern-derivation methods had been devised, and Colossus had
largely eliminated the χ component from the puzzle.

~~~
stan_rogers
The phrase "and bad patterns on the ψ-wheels" should have read "and bad
patterns on the μ-wheels". Sorry if there was any confusion; I caught that too
late for editing.

------
one2know
How do these come into private possession?

~~~
abeppu
Actually in general, what _should_ happen to the property of a government that
gets dismantled?

On the one hand, this stuff probably gets into private hands by theft at some
point, and it hardly seems just to legitimize opportunistic plundering.

On the other hand ... the state which owned it went out of existence. It's not
as though there was a German government whose property rights were being
infringed.

Perhaps the Allies could have fastidiously gathered all the assets of the
German military and held a big liquidation sale at Alexanderplatz, and used
the proceeds to buy food for the refugee camps.

~~~
eru
> On the other hand ... the state which owned it went out of existence.

The current German government sees itself as the successor to the previous
German governments.

See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_Germany)
for more detail than you ever wanted to know.

~~~
fortran77
Exactly. It was Germany--the same one that exists today--that marched into its
neighbors, conquering them and enslaving segments of their population. In the
U.S., it's common to hear people say "The Nazis invaded Poland" or "The Nazis
bombed London" but if you go to Poland, they'll say "The Germans invaded us"
and if you go to London they'll say "The Germans bombed us."

I don't know why it's common to pretend otherwise.

~~~
stordoff
When speaking about the state, I (UK) fairly often hear people refer to "Nazi
Germany", instead of just Germany (and sometimes used as "Nazi Germany invaded
Poland"). With the people though, it's generally just "the Germans".

------
intpx
On that note, I just finished a very interesting biography of Elizebeth Smith
Friedman who is a total unsung hero and the founding mother of the science of
cryptography. Her team with the Coast Guard cracked enigmas in parallel to
Turing. The Woman Who Smashed Codes, by Jason Fagone.

------
noahmbarr
Was hoping someone at least bid a prime number. Sadly, $437 is also divisible
by 19 and 23

~~~
Stupulous
The actual number was £347,250, which is £17 over the nearest prime number. In
USD, the actual number was $437,955 (headline rounds down for some reason), $2
over the nearest prime. They were probably limited to 250$ differences,
though, and 347 is prime, so that's something.

~~~
eru
Primes are pretty dense. So any random amount will be close to a prime number.

------
BitSoldier77
I believe Romania still has some of those left from switching sides in WW2.

