Enigma code broken

[Tony Smith]

From another board:

March 03, 2006

U-Boat's Enigma Cracked With PCs

By Gregg Keizer Courtesy of TechWeb News

Sixty years after the end of World War II, a network
of several thousand PCs has cracked a message
enciphered with the famous Enigma machine.
The M4 Message Breaking Project, started by Stefan
Krah, a German amateur cryptographer, in January, took
on three messages intercepted by British code-breakers
during WWII, but never cracked by the famous
cryptology facility at Bletchley Park.

The code breakers at Bletchley included computing
pioneer Alan Turing and used a combination of human
intelligence, guesswork, and elementary computing,
called "bombs" to decipher messages."

At various times, Bletchley Park could read virtually
all Enigma-ciphered messages to and from U-boats at
sea, which was instrumental in locating and sinking
the submarines, or steering convoys away from U-boat
wolfpacks.

The three messages were enciphered using the vaunted
Enigma, a machine that relied on a series of user-set
rotors and an accompanying plugboard to encrypt text
messages before they were radioed from U-boats in the
North Atlantic to the German navy's headquarters
ashore.

In January, Krah's Web site posted Unix and Windows
versions of an open-source client that runs in the
background on each machine. As in other
distributed-computing projects -- such as the one
recently started by the BBC to help model climate
change -- the message-breaking chore was broken into
small pieces, then parceled out to individual machines
that had installed the software.

On Feb. 20, Krah announced that the first message had
been broken.


The Enigma-enciphered message, which looked like this:

NCZWV USXPN YMINH ZXMQX SFWXW LKJAH SHNMC
OCCAK UQPMK CSMHK SEINJ USBLK IOSXC KUBHM
LLXCS JUSRR DVKOH ULXWC CBGVL IYXEO AHXRH
KKFVD REWEZ LXOBA FGYUJ QUKGR TVUKA MEURB
VEKSU HHVOY HABCJ WMAKL FKLMY FVNRI ZRVVR
TKOFD ANJMO LBGFF LEOPR GTFLV RHOWO PBEKV
WMUQF MPWPA RMFHA GKXII BG

Actually read, said Krah:

"F T 1132/19 Inhalt:
Bei Angriff unter Wasser gedrückt.
Wabos. Letzter Gegnerstand 0830 Uh
r AJ 9863, 220 Grad, 8 sm. Stosse nach.
14 mb. fällt, NNO 4, Sicht 10.
Looks"

And was translated into English to:

"F T 1132/19 contents:
Forced to submerge during attack.
Depth charges. Last enemy position 0830h
AJ 9863, [course] 220 degrees, [speed] 8 knots.
[I am] following [the enemy].
[barometer] falls 14 mb, [wind] nor-nor-east,
[force] 4, visibility 10 [nautical miles].
Looks"

Hartwig Looks, the captain of the U-264, was among the
52 survivors of a depth charge attack by two British
sloops, the HMS Woodpecker and HMS Starling, on Feb.
19, 1944.


So far, several runs have been completed against one
of the other messages, but with no success. "This does
not mean that this particular message can't be broken
with this method," Krah wrote on the project's blog.
"Some messages require many more walks through the
search space before a break occurs."

Currently, about 5,000 computers are participating in
the project. Users who want to install the
distributed-computing client can find it on the M4 Web
site.


Thanks to JP for this article,