Cryptography Stack Exchange
Cryptography Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [enigma]

The Enigma Machine was a piece of cryptographic hardware used by the German military during World War II; successful cryptanalysis was routinely applied against it and the scheme was considered broken. Questions relating to this machine should use this tag and you may also which to use the historic tag.

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Have any cryptographic breaks been executed in the real world since World War II?

Have there been any publicly known exploits of a cryptographic break in a widely used cryptographic system to actually read encrypted information (or falsely authenticate) since the Ultra program in World War II? I want to define my terms as…
Very Tiny Brain
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How cryptographically secure was the original WW2 Enigma machine, from a modern viewpoint?

If cryptanalysts today were to crack the original Enigma machine, “how fast” or “how easily” could they do it? What methods would they use? The original cracking was significantly helped by operator mistakes, like always including the same header,…
vsz
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Can an Enigma-style cipher of sufficient complexity be considered secure today?

Regarding the German Enigma machines, if I recall correctly, the reason they were defeated was because the Allies were able to generate a massive database of possible rotor settings, and because the day key was encoded twice in the beginning of each…
user93
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Are encryption algorithms with fixed-point free permutations inherently flawed?

Flaw in Enigma One of the Enigma machine's flaw was the derangement (fixed-point free permutation) of the produced ciphertext, or simply put: No plaintext-letter can be enciphered to itself. See this example from Wikipedia of how this text (in…
AleksanderCH
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How to build an electro-mechanical public key cipher machine?

It is generally assumed that asymmetric encryption schemes were invented in 1973 at GCHQ in Britain and, independently, in 1976 at the MIT. Imagine, if the abstract idea of having a public key and a private key that can only decrypt what has been…
Manuel Ebert
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Turing's (still?) classified inference engine algorithm?

Does anyone know the algorithm used by Turing's Colossus inference engine, so highly classified that the Brits kept it secret for decades after WW II? Indeed, it may still be classified. Several years ago a colleague of mine, the late Robert…
James Bowery
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Under what conditions did a Bletchley bombe stop?

I am trying to understand the conditions necessary for one of the Bletchley Park bombes to stop. Let me give an example. I have been experimenting with Enigma machine and bombe simulators to try to understand better how the bombe works. Using a…
Geoff
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How many possible Enigma machine settings?

I'm trying to calculate the amount of settings the enigma machine has. I have found several sites regarding this topic, but it seems like there are two answers to my question. The first answer is 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 and the second is…
Mephistopheles
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Would adding daily changing nulls in front of their messages have made the Engima harder to crack?

The British decrypted the German enigma because they knew that they would repeat the message key twice at the start of every message. Of course, technology to encrypt enigma without the repetition using cribs was developed later but only after it…
BlueWizard
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How does the ring settings of enigma change wiring tables?

EDIT: The model I'm trying to make is "Enigma 1". I learned initially about it from a book called "Code Book" and then looked at it in detail from its wikipedia page. The site wont allow me too add more links but google "enigma rotor details" and…
Givera Givera
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Why does the Bombe not consider the Ringstellung when determining stecker pairs?

I am doing research on the Bombe Machine, and I read that when the Bombe tries to find the stecker (plugboard) partners of letters, it only needs to use the rotor types and arrangement and also the "rotor core offset," which is just a combination of…
Queso Pez
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Does adding more characters to the Enigma rotors improve crypto strength?

This seems like an obvious question but I haven't been able to find it, so here goes: Enigma is based on an alphabet of A-Z (26 characters); obviously this directly affects message content (e.g. numbers would be specified using their names one,…
Adrian K
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culling equivalent Enigma keys for short messages

The following for-loop iterates over all possible keys for an M3 Enigma for three selected rotors: for start_pos_left in A..Z: for start_pos_middle in A..Z: for ring_middle in 1..26: for start_pos_right in A..Z: …
Will
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Is the logic for how the enigma machine worked documented somewhere?

I know that there is a formula to calculate the result of any input but is the logic of how the machine actually worked documented? I have seen schematics for the circuitry and even a how to make your own at home site. But has the logic been broken…
Chad
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How to deduce enigma settings given a partial plaintext?

Assuming some large block of text is encrypted with an enigma machine and I only know a small subset of letters before and after encryption, how do I go about figuring out the enigma settings from this point?
Chris
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