7 ms·
Rare and hardest to crack Enigma code machine sells for $437k
- tpmx 6y agoSo a Norwegian ex-colleague of mine randomly found a very pristine Enigma machine in the attic of his parents house (presumably left there by a grandparent, who had likely gotten hold of it in the spring/summer of 1945, somehow), about 13 years ago. I was a bit jealous about that find. Apparently only 250 or so remain, altogether. Photos here: https://web.archive.org/web/20070622082533/http://my.opera.com/TMS/albums/show.dml?id=46514 https://web.archive.org/web/20070622082533/http://my.opera.c... (The guy who took/posted the photos is separate from the lucky guy who found it. Please don't bother him.)
- peanutz454 6y ago"Enigma machine at Opera", so this ex-colleague of yours work at Opera the ex-awesome browser making company?
- tpmx 6y agoYeah, we both worked there at the time. Back when it was actually awesome :).
- sergiotapia 6y agoBack then (2003,2004) Opera showed me what the web could be. The tool outshined everything else on the market. Hell, I remember loving dragonfly and presto and it's what got me interested in web stuff. So thanks!
- tpmx 6y agoThat's great!
- kmonsen 6y agoI used to work there too, those were really fun times.
- phasetransition 6y agoThe photos of that enigma are amazing! It looks like it was taken straight off the factory floor. "New Old Stock" indeed.
- chrisweekly 6y agoIt's HN so most of you probably already know and love Neal Stephenson's writing, but any time Enigma comes up I feel compelled to recommend "Cryptonomicon", one of my all-time favorite novels in any genre.
- smabie 6y agoHonestly, I don't think Stephenson is a very good writer. His writing is didactic and pompous. William Gibson on the other hand crafts perfect sentences, each and every time. I read cryptonomicon when I was 15 and thoroughly convinced myself that it was "awesome." After reading it again when I was older, I realized that I wanted to like it, because of what it said about the kind of person I aspired to be at the time.
- cantrevealname 6y agoI want to love that book -- it's everything I'm interested in -- but oh my god that book is so verbose. For example, he spends 1.5 pages describing what the clouds in the sky look like and it has nothing to do with the plot. I tried twice to read it but gave up at halfway. It's 918 pages, but I think it could lose at least 300 pages and still keep all the brilliant ideas. If someone created a condensed version of it, I think the book could reach a whole new audience.
- Spooky23 6y agoI always felt like an inferior geek for not liking that book and others.
- jki275 6y agoI never felt that way about the book. He is verbose, but it all contributes in some way. A lot of writing is setting things up, and he does it so masterfully in Cryptonomicon.
- infogulch 6y agoI learned patience reading Moby Dick at 14, after trying and failing at 12. I am now a very patient person. And I treasure the concept of the end of a sentence.
- jhallenworld 6y agoIn the Boston area there is a guy who reliably attends ham radio and antique radio swap meets (Flea at MIT, NEARC)- he always shows off his Enigma machines. This adds tremendously to the atmosphere of these events, and I always appreciate seeing his exhibit. Damn Covid, these shows are all canceled for now..
- djaque 6y agoThe MIT flea is awesome and I've met him a few times. Definitely visit if you get the chance.
- noahmbarr 6y agoWas hoping someone at least bid a prime number. Sadly, $437 is also divisible by 19 and 23
- Stupulous 6y agoThe actual number was £347,250, which is £17 over the nearest prime number. In USD, the actual number was $437,955 (headline rounds down for some reason), $2 over the nearest prime. They were probably limited to 250$ differences, though, and 347 is prime, so that's something.
- eru 6y agoPrimes are pretty dense. So any random amount will be close to a prime number.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoThe enigma's encryption didn't have anything to do with primes though :) It was just a super complex automated substitution.
- one2know 6y agoHow do these come into private possession?
- abeppu 6y agoActually in general, what _should_ happen to the property of a government that gets dismantled? On the one hand, this stuff probably gets into private hands by theft at some point, and it hardly seems just to legitimize opportunistic plundering. On the other hand ... the state which owned it went out of existence. It's not as though there was a German government whose property rights were being infringed. Perhaps the Allies could have fastidiously gathered all the assets of the German military and held a big liquidation sale at Alexanderplatz, and used the proceeds to buy food for the refugee camps.
- perl4ever 6y ago>It's not as though there was a German government whose property rights were being infringed It's pretty common to regard a country as having a claim on looted artifacts even after a change in government. It kind of seems to be taken for granted in a lot of discussions. e.g. https://www.npr.org/2018/06/28/623537440/hobby-lobbys-illegal-antiquities-shed-light-on-a-lost-looted-ancient-city-in-ira https://www.npr.org/2018/06/28/623537440/hobby-lobbys-illega... Nobody seems to particularly care whether the Sumerians, or the city of Irisagrig, still exist.
- eru 6y ago> On the other hand ... the state which owned it went out of existence. The current German government sees itself as the successor to the previous German governments. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_Germany for more detail than you ever wanted to know.
- fortran77 6y agoExactly. It was Germany--the same one that exists today--that marched into its neighbors, conquering them and enslaving segments of their population. In the U.S., it's common to hear people say "The Nazis invaded Poland" or "The Nazis bombed London" but if you go to Poland, they'll say "The Germans invaded us" and if you go to London they'll say "The Germans bombed us." I don't know why it's common to pretend otherwise.
- redelbee 6y agoWhat do you think the present-day cryptological equivalent of the Enigma machine and its decryption is? I’m most interested in examples of consequence (e.g. saving lives by shortening war) rather than comparisons of technical achievement.
- upofadown 6y agoThings are quite different these days. Code makers seem to have run far in advance of code breakers. Since there are no major wars running, if someone did break something significant they would save it for later.
- est31 6y agoAnd yet I feel we are living in the golden age of signals intelligence. The only reason to not say that is because trends point towards an even better golden age. Already the scale of the open source stuff out there has never existed before. And then add speculative stuff like saving encrypted content to decrypt it later decades down the line when methods and hardware have improved. Just a single insider can walk out with an USB stick full of the crown jewels of a place supposed to keep secrets... Pretty sure the US intelligence community didn't have records of basic data of each individual living in europe in WW2 times, but they certainly do now, simply thanks to electronic records systems collecting the data and them just having to harvest the data fruits whether it's by hacking or other means.
- eru 6y agoMostly, yes. Though for perspective: when engaged in a hot war you tend not to care too much about what your opponent can figure out in a few decades. Even enigma would have been mostly good enough, if the allies had taken a few weeks to decrypt each message. In peace time learning old secrets is comparatively more useful.
- est31 6y ago> when engaged in a hot war you tend not to care too much about what your opponent can figure out in a few decades. IDK if the allies would have had a list of gay Germans from encrypted data they collected decades prior they could have used that data for extortion. Even if it took decades of progress, they'd have had ample time. The question is, does collecting data now put you into a better position than not having such collections. And the answer is maybe to yes. Even if it's just maybe it's probably worth the investment for the DoD.
- Animats 6y agoFour rotors. Now that would tire out your fingers. The limitation on the number of rotors is key pressure. A 3-rotor Enigma has a huge key travel and you have to push hard. (I've had the opportunity.) The friction between the contacts is high. That's why these machines were not built with enough rotors to be really secure. The next step up was the Lorenz 10-rotor machine, but that had to be motorized. But the crypto design of that was botched, and it's easy to crack. A real 10-rotor alphabetical Enigma-like machine without a "reflector" would have been secure against any attacks of the period.
- KMag 6y agoInstead of a reflector, they could have used 27 contacts, and either had a 27th lightbulb to indicate the output was the same as the input, or made each key a dual-throw dual-post switch so that the 27th output would get wired to light up the switch corresponding to the input key. That would remove the weakness that no letter is ever enciphered as itself. Edit: never mind: you'd actually need 28 contacts, since the reflector can only reflect an even number of contacts. With an even number of unused contacts on the input side of the rotor stack, you could connect them together in pairs to get extra passes through the rotor stacks. If they added / (for use as a number shift symbol, so 1123 would be /AABC/ ) to their alphabet, then they could use 28 contacts and have something like described above. However, without modifying the alphabet space to have an odd number of symbols, all other workarounds I can think of require an odd number of used inputs at the one end of the rotor stack and and even number of contacts at the reflector end. The Germans used Q or Z as their number shift symbol when enciphering digits for Enigma traffic, correct?
- taejo 6y ago> The Germans used Q or Z as their number shift symbol when enciphering digits for Enigma traffic, correct? In the few random decrypts I looked at (from U-Boat traffic), e.g., https://enigma.hoerenberg.com/index.php?cat=The%20U534%20messages&page=P1030659 https://enigma.hoerenberg.com/index.php?cat=The%20U534%20mes... numbers were spelled out.
- tialaramex 6y ago
- WalterBright 6y ago> he declared that the Allies could not possibly have deciphered his Enigma messages One should always assume deciphering. I would have used one-time pads on top of the Enigma. There weren't that many U-boots, so it should have been workable.
- extrememacaroni 6y agoTheir first mistake was rolling their own crypto. Never roll your own crypto.
- ThreeFx 6y agoTo be fair, those days there (fortunately) wasn't really a useful cryptographic standard to use.
- intpx 6y agoOn that note, I just finished a very interesting biography of Elizebeth Smith Friedman who is a total unsung hero and the founding mother of the science of cryptography. Her team with the Coast Guard cracked enigmas in parallel to Turing. The Woman Who Smashed Codes, by Jason Fagone.
- BitSoldier77 6y agoI believe Romania still has some of those left from switching sides in WW2.