Solving A Puzzle from WWII

[nihil]

Notwithstanding 14 (A)

?

[@tt!tud3]

"I think there is more satisfaction for people engaged in the project to know that they have been able to do something that Bletchley Park couldn't do," he said.

What a *censored* stupid thing to say. Bletchley Park didn't have computers 60 years ago. They took some of the brightest people in the free world and had them use their MINDS to crack the codes.

Enigma didn't work?!? Ouch. Well - I think will check this out from home later and jump in meebe.

Actually ENIGMA was solved before the war ended.

The stupidity of this article was that there was no need
to decode transmissions prior to it being cracked open.

They solved all future transmissions, but left unsolved
transmissions previous to their successful decryption.

[d0pp]

Surely the CIA is able to crack it, they're just not ready to
let the world know yet.

CIA doesn't really do cryptographical work. That is handled by the NSA at Fort Meade.

[genXer]

Originally quoted by TH13
This is an example of a polyalphabetic cipher. What you need is the keyword used to encipher this text and the actual multiple alphabet cipher used. I know that I've seen popular Nazi keywords used in these types of messages. Perhaps you can start trying some.

Obviously, the Nazis were aware of frequency analysis.

If you want to see an example of a polyalphabetic cipher, take a look at the Vigenere cipher.

Best of luck.

--TH13

Oh man - that takes me back. I still remember cracking my first code during training - simple cipher - but still a good feeling when you get the crack.

Originally quoted by foxeyloxey
I got it .........

quote:
message to interpol :
please send flowers to my mum for her birthday
message to read sorry I won't be there love Fritz

So you don't think it ended with "Er-ah ich bin ein Berliner!"?

[nihil]

OK.

The enigma machine was NOT a German invention...............they bought it........MI6 got a copy.................it should really not have been such a big deal, as it was secure enough for the time...............but, it was quite widely deployed and had our personal favourites........"users".

Now, if they took a shortcut...............and one of them was bound to.................we could use our version of the machine to decode stuff. Even when they added an extra wheel..............human error?

[d0pp]

"Er-ah ich bin ein Berliner!"?

ROFL

[zencoder]

Originally posted here by @tt!tud3
What a *censored* stupid thing to say. Bletchley Park didn't have computers 60 years ago. They took some of the brightest people in the free world and had them use their MINDS to crack the codes.

Actually ENIGMA was solved before the war ended.

The stupidity of this article was that there was no need to decode transmissions prior to it being cracked open.

They solved all future transmissions, but left unsolved transmissions previous to their successful decryption.

Wrong.

Source
Colossus
The first machine designed to break the Lorenz was built at the Post Office research department at Dollis Hill and called ‘Heath Robinson’ after the cartoonist designer of fantastic machines. Although Heath Robinson worked well enough to show that Max Newman’s concepts were correct, it was slow and unreliable.
Max Newman called in the help of Tommy Flowers, a brilliant Post Office Electronics Engineer. Flowers went on to design and build ‘Colossus’, a much faster and more reliable machine that used 1,500 thermionic valves (vacuum tubes). The first Colossus machine arrived at Bletchley in December 1943. This was the world’s first practical electronic digital information processing machine - a forerunner of today’s computers.

...and from the article...

Using early computers, Bletchley Park decoded thousands of intercepts in a knife-edge race to head off U-boat attacks.

Yes, they needed the best and brightest. But the aid of electric systems was necessary to do the repetative mechanical work of code-breaking so it could be reliable AND fast enough to be of any value at all to the war effort. If they had done all the cracking via pure mental sweat equity, they'd still be at it...and we'd be singing Das Lied der Deutschen and watching David Hasselhoff every night on TV.

"Enigma" wasn't solved... The algorithm and protocols that the Enigma machines used was determined well enough (with large effort on the Allies part) to reliably decrypt many of the transmissions...until 1942 when the Germans changed to a new Enigma platform (correct d0pp, it was the 4 wheel) and a new algorithm.

[br_fusion]

Would it make sense to say that the longer the encrypted text produced by a polyalphabetic cipher, the easier it is to discover the original text? Especially if the keyword that produces the encrypted text is a small number of characters.