Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Run your own Enigma machine

The Enigma was Nazi German's super secret cipher machine in World War II.  The Brits cracked it (with a little help from the Royal Navy who seized one from a sinking U-Boat) at Bletchley Park.  This was so secret that very few - Churchill and just a handful of others - got briefed on this "ULTRA" intelligence.

Now there is an online Enigma emulator, and another one for the Bombe device that cracked it.  There's just one little hitch: the emulator is from GCHQ - the British NSA:
UK signals intelligence agency GCHQ, celebrating its centenary, has released emulators for famed World War II-era cipher machines that can be run within its web-based educational encryption app CyberChef. 
"We've brought technology from our past into the present by creating emulators for Enigma, Typex and the Bombe in #CyberChef," GCHQ said Thursday via Twitter. "We even tested them against the real thing! Try them out for yourself!"
Is it all above board?  Who knows?  It seems like using this to try to surveil budding cipherpunks is risky.   But if you want to walk on the crypto wild side, here's your chance.

3 comments:

  1. Old NFOMarch 19, 2019 at 12:07 PM

    I'll pass... :-D

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ed BonderenkaMarch 19, 2019 at 12:38 PM

    Cracking Enigma. So passe.
    :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. RitchieMarch 20, 2019 at 10:59 AM

    There's also a story that some enterprising Scandinavians backed a truck up to a local police station and threw their Enigma into the back. Whether the local POPO would even have an Enigma is sort of an open question.

    ReplyDelete

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