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National Museum of Computing to hold live Enigma code-breaking demo with a Bombe
The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) is going to fire up its replica Enigma code-breaker to decrypt encoded messages sent from Poland – with an original wartime Bombe operator supervising the process. The British museum's Bombe replica, recently moved into the original Block H building that housed the wartime Bombes, is a …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 19th September 2018 18:48 GMT YAAC
Block H didn’t house any Bombe machines. It was erected between May and September 1944 to house Colossus 5 to 9. It therefore qualifies as the first purpose built computer centre.
A viewing of the Bombe replica, a truly monumental undertaking, is the perfect accompaniment to Colossus, Heath Robinson and the Tunny machine rebuilds Then take in the rest of TNMOC, best done on one of the public tours.
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Wednesday 19th September 2018 21:32 GMT GrumpyKiwi
France contributed too
The French were also involved in the initial work to crack Enigma, assisting the Poles. And the Poles who fled after the German invasion went to France first to continue their work.
When France fell, the French first passed on all their work to date to the UK and then (even more importantly) never once let on to the Germans that their systems were vulnerable to compromise.
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Thursday 20th September 2018 03:12 GMT FrankAlphaXII
Good deal. Hope it works well.
Very cool. If it wasn't in the middle of the night here I'd definitely be checking it out. Hopefully they'll make a recording available.
Now as cool as this is, what would be even more impressive is a demonstration of the SIGSALY, which was the first encrypted telex and telephone system that Roosevelt and Churchill used to communicate with the WWII equivalents to the modern Unified Commands during the war, but it would take some doing to get it to work for an actual demonstration. It was a fairly touchy system even when it was being used all the time.
NSA still has the one that was installed at the Pentagon at the National Cryptographic Museum (I've seen it but I'm not sure if it works, its not powered on) and I'm not entirely sure if that's the only machine left in existence, it very well might be because I can't find anything clear about what happened to the one that was at Selfridges in their sub-basement. I'm assuming that GCHQ, the Australian Signals Directorate, or even the TNMOC might have one somewhere, there were like 12 of them by the end of the war, but I can't confirm where any of them besides the one at NSA wound up.
Searching for the term SIGSALY on the TNMOC webpage doesn't return anything, the Crypto Museum organization's rather good article on the system doesn't say what happened to the actual hardware and NSA's public facing article on SIGSALY doesn't specify either.
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Monday 24th September 2018 09:34 GMT Lotaresco
Re: Support the TNMOC
'Back then you had to wait for the TV set to "boot";'
Heavens no. Your CRT TV did not boot. Like all thermionic valve equipment of the era (RADAR, Radio, Mine detectors etc) it had to "warm up" before it could be used. Which was important for Colossus which had to be kept running 24/7 both to be ready to use when needed and also to improve reliability because components weren't subject to variable thermal loading.
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Saturday 29th September 2018 19:50 GMT DropBear
Re: Support the TNMOC
Heavens no. Your CRT TV did not boot
*sigh* okay... we need to establish here if you really think I'm a simpleton dense enough to actually think those old TVs I am apparently old enough to have witnessed in person needed to literally "boot", as in "run code until they're ready to show the picture". Because if you do not - do you think you might just possibly lend me the artistic license to call "booting" (already in quotes in the original, very much on purpose) the fairly lengthy process of having to wait between pressing the button and getting to see the picture...?
I probably still have somewhere the channel selector of our old valve-based TV - it had two amplifier valves in shielded cans you could unscrew right on top of the selector drum, which was full of small PCBs housing tunable inductors, switched in and out of circuit through a comb of contacts. I KNOW how valve-based TVs worked, thank you very much. My dad and I have fixed ours a few times, until the CRT filament went open circuit and there was nothing left to fix. Thank you for taking an interest in my comment. And no, I'm not going to start choosing my words more carefully just because some apparently take pride in nitpicking everything that isn't 100% nailed down to mean one and only one thing.
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Thursday 20th September 2018 10:48 GMT Alfred
Evidence for Skilled Abacus Operator being faster than someone with a calculator
"does anyone have any evidence for or against the old claim that a skilled abacus operator can produce results faster than someone using a handheld calculator?"
I'm glad you specified "skilled abacus operator" rather than specifying operating on an actual abacus.
The very skilled abacus operators don't even the abacus; they begin with the physical abacus, but as they progress they use a model of one inside their head to do the calculation, instead of having to accept the delay of physically manipulating a real abacus.
Here's a skilled abacus operator (not using an actual abacus - that'd be too slow!) summing 10 four digit numbers in three seconds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g63WR_PelY&t=0m55s
Here's a Guardian piece on the championships. 15 three digit numbers flashed up in 1.70 seconds , and the skilled abacus operator summed them.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2012/oct/29/mathematics
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Thursday 20th September 2018 14:35 GMT a_builder
I used to play chess with one the Bletchley code breakers, John Herivel, as a kid.
Very nice unassuming guy. Mind as sharp as a razor.
I think you underestimate how clever what they did was given how limited what they had access to was and how they had to determine everything from first principles. Yes, by modern standards the Bombe has an excruciatingly slow clock pulse (the incrementation is essentially a clock pulse) but back then it was incredible. And incredibly fast.
Yes, the Bombe only ever narrowed the solution set down but combined with say the Herivel tip and the elimination of various solutions that were not possible it gave a narrow range of possibilities that could be tested within a timeframe that made the intel useful at that time.
What these guys did with what they had to hand, very often pencil and paper and their brains, is quite incredible.
I salute them and wish I had their tenacity and insights.
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Thursday 20th September 2018 09:12 GMT Citizen99
Editorial @ElReg
Not Block H for the Enigma message demo. Also see YAAC's posting above and others.
We visited Bletchley Park the day before yesterday (18 Sep 2018). In Block H were the 'Heath Robinson' and 'Colossus' re-builds, the machines that were used against the 'Tunny' high-level traffic. No sign of any 'Bombe', the machines thet were used to crack the 'tactical' level Enigma traffic. The National Museum Of Computing room was closed; peering through the glass window in the door we couldn't see past the more modern stuff to see if any Bombe was lurking in there.
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Thursday 20th September 2018 12:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Random
Seems that some of the valves for Colossus Mark 0 were hand selected using a resonant step up technique involving a kitchen scourer and voltmeter to rapidly sort through them so that critical timing related parameters could be matched.
Wonder what other "goodies" we aren't aware of because of the Official Secrets Act 1949 ? seems that some of the records are sealed even now until (IIRC) 2024.
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Thursday 20th September 2018 14:06 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Random
by the time 2024 rolls around, there won't be a whole lot of engineers out there that understand vacuum tubes [aka 'valves'] very well, at least not well enough to appreciate the process of trying to rapidly determine matched sets from a pile of contenders. Well, maybe some guitar amp and tube-audio enthusiasts might, but that's about it.
Also have to appreciate the level of hacking done back then, because the war demanded results, NOW, and there was no time to waste.
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Sunday 16th February 2020 08:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Random
I only found out about it due to some elderly amateur radio enthusiasts discussing a similar method being used to match tubes on output stages, but couldn't understand at the time why it would help. Later worked out that valves that didn't make the grade got sold on at a lower price rather than simply destroyed to disguise what they were doing with them.
Seems that agents visited literally every supplier in the UK rounding up and testing specific tubes they thought might be useful, the people doing the testing didn't know why though. As heaters were never fully powered it didn't stress the tubes.
Classic example of compartmentalization!
Seems that Tektronix did something similar but they would buy a lot of specific parts then test them for the exact values and thermal profile needed. Laser trimming of resistors wasn't invented until much later.
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Thursday 20th September 2018 16:19 GMT a_yank_lurker
Enigma Flaw
There was an interesting flaw in the Enigma machine that reduced the complexity of the code a little. It would never map a letter to itself. Plaintext "A" would never be mapped to "A" in the cypher. Also, there were numerous 'cribs' developed to help in figuring out the daily solutions that sped up the process. The real genius was the application of math to understand how even try to break the code and thus design and build the bombes and later Colossus.
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Thursday 20th September 2018 16:55 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Enigma Flaw
I always wondered if this was enough of a flaw to make the system breakable?
From all the accounts I have read, and the talks by the people who used it, it was failures in OPSEC that led to the breaks. Picking the same daily 6 letter groups, re-sending the same message with the same settings, sending identical weather daily reports by both Enigma and easily cracked simple codes etc,
Anyone know of a modern cryptanalysis of the Enigma?
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Friday 21st September 2018 08:57 GMT Andrew3456
Re: Enigma Flaw
Hi you will find the following paper very interesting in this regard, talks a lot about deciphering of authentic WW2 messages!
http://cryptocellar.org/pubs/Enigma_ModernBreaking.pdf
I read the James Gillogly paper years back (anyone have a link?) when the Simon Singh cipher challenge
was going on, even wrote a small program to decode the challenge example myself. Appears since then
some great improvements have been made to Jame's method.
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Friday 21st September 2018 10:20 GMT a_builder
Re: Enigma Flaw
It is absolutely true that A could never be A etc in Enigma which did reduce the solution set of itself.
Also combined with
- Herival tip - reduced range of rotor settings - only started to be off use later in the war - essentially laziness (human nature) in changing the settings
Gardening - doing something that would be reported by two systems such as dropping mines obtrusively where the other reporting channel was penetrated
Weather book - weather report origins could be triangulated and the weather known and this was often reported by two codes one of which was penetrated. This was the early door in but was shut.
-The bits that are still classified probably do relate to OPSEC insights as well as how the physical data was interpreted to provide cribs. As well as traffic analysis which is really the untold story that will probably never be fully told as all those who really understood that are now gone and the records from that period are hardly garrulous.
John [Herivel] was always of the view that the Enigma secret should never have been told. He would never say why he was of that view. All codes are breakable, so that cannot be the reason, but my guess was that it was rather the raft of ingenuity around taking peripheral data and using that to penetrate the encryption was really the great secret. Personally, and I have no special insight into this, I think it is the maths behind the OPSEC and traffic analysis that probably a greater secret than cracking Enigma.
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Thursday 20th September 2018 18:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
RE. Re. Enigma Flaw
Yes I think there are C# and JVM implementations now.
Someone even wrote one that runs on a Pi, though more of them means faster decryption.
Actually better off using a graphics card as even one from maybe 4 yeara ago with a few running repairs would do fine.
Interesting anecdote *2, an AI fed random encrypted messages decoded them much faster than with conventional dictionary/crib/etc searches by brute force.
Random idea: use a network of Pi on a DIY backplane.
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Thursday 20th September 2018 19:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Please stop referring to Alan Turing as a code breaker. He assisted with the construction of some machines to assist the code breakers, he himself didn’t break codes.
Also it would be nice to credit the Poles who originally designed the Bombes – Brexit is one thing, but it doesn’t mean we have to go down the path of ignoring the contributions of our allies.