15 ms·
P1030680: Unbroken Enigma message (U534, 01 May 1945)
- auditor_3d 3y agoOne of the exciting things I see in store for GPT is the ability for it to decipher messages like this one day if it can’t already
- stubybubs 3y ago[flagged]
- mewse-hn 3y agoWas this never broken because the enigma@home community lost interest? It looks like their last forums posts were from 2019
- adastra22 3y agoOr it's a garbled message.
- bragr 3y agoI think this is the most likely answer. Everything in Germany was collapsing at the time, so a garbled message being sent, or incorrectly received seems likely. Consider the circumstances: - 6 days after US and Soviet forces linked up bisecting Germany - 1 day after Hitler's suicide - 5 days before the unconditional surrender of the Flensburg Government
- kristopolous 3y agoThat's a pretty good set up for some wild fiction. You could go to the fabled moon / arctic bases, time travel, aliens ... it's a nice foundation. Problem is these days people would start believing in whatever fiction you write. The internet is broken like that.
- danielvaughn 3y agoA company I used to work for was partly comprised of hackers, and one of the books they always raved about was called Cryptonomicon. I know that it involves the nazis and encoded secrets, though I never read it (still on my to-read list). I'd recommend checking it out if that kind of thing sounds interesting to you.
- andyjohnson0 3y agoI read it back in the day. I can't remember much of the plot, but i do remember that it seemed about twice as long as it needed to be. Which I find ro be typical of Stephenson's fiction. Plenty of people seem to like it though.
- buildbot 3y agoLess so than his later books in my opinion. It’s a lot of great plot throughout with good explanations of the math concepts it refers to. I may be biased, After reading wheel of time, nothing seems too long anymore!
- sleepybrett 3y agoHe does like regressions into historical causes and effect chains... hell the whole system of the world trilogy is almost nothing BUT that (and contains some character/family crossovers with cryptonomicon)
- wkat4242 3y agoI liked it but I thought it was overly dramatic in a "survival of the fittest" way and indeed way too long. But I'm not a fan of the guy anyway. It is a decent book to read once though.
- buildbot 3y agoCryptonomicon is almost exactly this premise :) It’s an amazing book, one that any aspiring hacker should read!
- 3y ago
- bredren 3y agoMaybe solving this would be determining a set of likely encrypted messages. They could be scored by decrypted content matching structure of priors and context. Along with char difference from the encrypted message on record.
- netsharc 3y agoI can picture it: a German soldier feeling defeated just set the keys to something random and typed his message, sending a message without expecting anyone to hear... "In the old days, if someone had a secret they didn’t want to share, they went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it with mud and leave the secret there forever." - Wong Kar Wai/In The Mood for Love
- fifilura 3y agoOr a message from an allied conscript who was just doodling after he found this weird typewriter
- jameshart 3y agoAmusing image though this is, Enigma machines were, in case you weren’t aware, not actually radio transmitter/receivers. An enigma message would be typed in to the machine and the output characters written down on a piece of paper, then the message would be transmitted over Morse by hand, transcribed to paper at the other end, then typed through the correspondingly configured Enigma machine to obtain plaintext.
- hinkley 3y agoI have enough trouble typing things I mean to say without trying to transcribe line noise. That sounds like a terrible job.
- gnu8 3y agoIn absolute terms, pre-digital cryptographic equipment operator isn't the worst wartime job I can think of. However, on a U-boat, all of the jobs were equally worse (due to life expectancy).
- jameshart 3y agoActually makes me wonder - given the way encrypted messages were transmitted in the era, wasn’t it possible for an adversary to flood the channel with bogus messages? Transmit messages with valid addressing and header data but fake content, forcing radio operators to transcribe and attempt to decrypt garbage?
- bonestamp2 3y agoAlso, what if the machine was broken? Or if there was an error in transcription? There are so many possible reasons why this message may never be decrypted.
- mannykannot 3y agoSurely this would be tantamount to announcing to the enemy that you have broken their encryption scheme?
- justinjlynn 3y agoYes. As such it would be a last resort and even then likely done very carefully (perhaps even to the point of burning a high level human intelligence source or sources as a plausible explanation for it). We're talking "no alternative" levels of desperation.
- jameshart 3y agoWhy? You don’t need to be able to understand a cipher to produce plausible cipher text. You can take headers and footers from real messages and just drop in nonsense between. Or retransmit messages you recorded a few days earlier, or random mixtures of bits of real messages. The enemy still has to transcribe them, sort them out, reject the noise.
- mannykannot 3y agoFrom what I recall of how Enigma worked, headers (and footers, if the concept applied) were also encrypted. IIRC a transmission started with the rotor settings for the rest of the message encrypted using the daily setting and sent twice. Even sending this much, such that both copies communicated the same setting, would reveal that Enigma was compromised, I think.
- dudeinjapan 3y agoProbably done intentionally to troll amateur cryptographers in the future and waste CPU. These guys really were Nazis.
- mechatrocity 3y agoIve been apart of that project but it's been dead for years, seems like it's unmaintained now :(
- nwallin 3y agoImpossible to say. The German commo who was tasked with decrypting this message couldn't/didn't decrypt it, and he had the keys. For all we know, some bored German submariner sent garbage over the radio as protest; this message was sent two days after Hitler committed suicide, 7 days before VE day. (8 days if you're of the Soviet persuasion) Morale and discipline has a tendency to break down under those circumstances. Or it could be a transcription error. Modern cryptanalysis tends to be more resilient to transcription errors; one character wrong is gonna be ok, one character inserted/deleted will tend to produce two messages, one with garbage after the insertion/deletion and another with garbage before it. But Enigma messages were...terse, so a half-successful decrypt that gets half garbage and half plaintext might still be recognized by the cryptanalysis algorithm as the wrong key. I expect there would have to be at least two transcription errors to cause both the original German commo to be unable to decrypt it and modern attempts to fail.
- hinkley 3y agoGarbled message, or garbled key? I wonder how often mis-keyed messages were sent out. Not typos in the message, but setting the initial state to the wrong value. Transposition, for instance.
- nwallin 3y agoGarbled message. If it were a garbled key, that would explain why the original commo couldn't/didn't decrypt it, but if it were just a garbled key, modern cryptanalysis would have decrypted it already.
- somedude895 3y ago[flagged]
- lionkor 3y agoDid you expect ChatGPT to generate a meaningful response?
- CrazyStat 3y agoI have a friend--a software engineer--who was convinced when ChatGPT came out that it would be able to do things like invert sha1 hashes, if only you found the right prompt. There's a lot of magical thinking around LLMs, but in the end they're "just" fancy Markov chains.
- RajT88 3y agoI'm sure it's possible for some SHA1 hashes along the lines of "password1234". A shockingly high number of SHA1 hashes with their cleartext was available on Google Code back in the day. I assume you can crawl github for the same now.
- lucideer 3y ago> I still thought it interesting I don't know why you've been downvoted to oblivion but I DO find this thoroughly uninteresting. I am however interested in why anyone WOULD find it interesting.
- petecooper 3y agohttps://archive.is/JE6MR https://archive.is/JE6MR https://web.archive.org/web/20230626181049/https://enigma.hoerenberg.com/index.php?cat=Unbroken&page=P1030680 https://web.archive.org/web/20230626181049/https://enigma.ho... (I wasn't expecting this to hit #1)
- 29athrowaway 3y agoProbably an input error. They set the machine wrong.
- edent 3y agoMy favourite Enigma message - as told to me by a tour guide at Bletchley Park - was thought to be a stream of indecipherable gibberish. Until a WREN noticed that the message never contained the letter Z. One weakness of that generation of Enigma was that it could not self-encode a letter. That is, A was never encrypted to A. This had no letter Zs. A statistical improbability. Unless, so she reckoned, the entire message consisted of only the letter Z repeated. Apparently, their best guess was that a bored soldier sent a stream of Zzzzzz to a friend. That was enough to crack that day's key. Of course, every guide at Bletchley has a range of stories they tell credulous geeks. But it is a delightful tale of how OpSec is everything.
- soperj 3y agoPretty sure Germans use Chrrrr.
- jonathankoren 3y agoDoesn’t matter. You’re interpreting it as some stupid message, when it’s literally a bored 19 year old pressing which ever key is most convenient again and again and again and again… simply to create bogus radio traffic. There were tons of bogus messages where the wheels were set to whatever German teenager’s favorite four letter swear word was.
- bragr 3y agoIIRC there was one German operator who used his sweetheart's initials over and over as the combination allowing for decryption.
- jonathankoren 3y agoI believe these single letter "messages" were useful in quickly determining the day's setup, and maybe wiring diagrams, but I'm not sure about the last part.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
- jfengel 3y agoAt this point, how long would it take to brute-force an Enigma message on a modern home computer? Is it on the order of hours, or millennia? I found this: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/33628/how-many-possible-enigma-machine-settings#:~:text=Wikipedia%20is%20your%20friend%3A%20%22Combining,159%20quintillion)%20different%20settings.%22 https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/33628/how-many-po... which says the key space is something like 10^20 or 10^23. A modern supercomputer does something like 10^18 FLOPS. I assume that an enigma decryption is considerably more than a single floating point operation, but presumably just a few orders of magnitude. So... if I'm reading that right, we're talking about months, perhaps?
- louwhopley 3y agoAlso curious!
- captaincrunch 3y agoIt would still take many orders of magnitude longer than the current age of the universe to brute-force decrypt an Enigma message on todays fastest desktop.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DavidSJ 3y agoHmm, the universe is over 10^17 seconds old and the key space is apparently only a few orders of magnitude larger, so this seems wrong.
- dgacmu 3y agoIt's only 2^69, or 512 exa-decryptions. A 4090 does 44 tera ops/sec (roughly 2^45), so we're left with 2^24 × ops per decode. If it takes 1000 ops to check a key, that's 2^34, or 16 billion seconds. About 500 years. Give or take a few centuries, it's very far from the age of the universe.
- aquova 3y agoAn episode of Computerphile attempted to answer the question - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzWB5jL5RX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzWB5jL5RX0. TL;DW: With some clever tricks, and the advantage of hindsight, it can be done reasonably quickly on a modern computer.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago[flagged]
- wizzwizz4 3y agoWhy did this seem worth trying, to you?
- 1970-01-01 3y agoIt's a great way to verify the machine knows nothing.
- wizzwizz4 3y agoWe already know it knows nothing – but this doesn't verify it. I could produce a similar response, even though I know you can't crack Enigma in O(n) time. Well, not unless you ignore the 158962555217826360000 constant factor. (Ref: https://the-axiom.uk/how-long-would-it-take-you-to-crack-the-enigma-machine/ https://the-axiom.uk/how-long-would-it-take-you-to-crack-the...)
- Gene5ive 3y agoI don't know why this was hidden. I find it interesting.
- Dylan16807 3y agoYou find a list of patterns in a string, except none of those patterns are actually in the string, interesting? Or you find "LLM can't handle characters" interesting? Those both seem extremely boring (and off topic) to me.
- TillE 3y agoThe most interesting thing is that a bunch of apparently smart people keep treating LLMs as if they were truly capable of something resembling problem-solving or logical thought, or even "understanding" a question. It should surprise no one that they're bad at string processing, and yet.
- FredPret 3y agoTime to dust off Cryptonomicon again!
- kens 3y agoThe page doesn't make it very clear, but the analysis at the bottom says that is a message that the German recipient tried to decode in several different ways and then gave up. Apparently the message indicates the key (indicator group?) twice, but was VA in one place and VR in another, so the message was clearly received corrupted. Neither indicator worked so the recipient tried other things that also didn't work. Given that the message is corrupted and the recipient with the key couldn't decode it, it's not surprising that the message remains unbroken. Even brute force isn't going to work if you start with garbage.
- DrNosferatu 3y ago[flagged]
- comeonbro 3y agoThis is not replicating when I try it on various simulators. It's also 12 characters shorter. Let me guess: you ran this through an LLM, and have posted the resulting hallucination as an undisclaimed fact.
- flatiron 3y agohttps://chat.openai.com/share/b0f021ec-20b8-4b6d-bf6d-e8aa8334cdb9 https://chat.openai.com/share/b0f021ec-20b8-4b6d-bf6d-e8aa83... at least for me gpt-4 gave a summary and said it cant crack it
- GabrielTFS 3y agoI actually would find it quite unlikely that this is LLM output, if only because I bet it would have instantly been censored the moment it uttered something alike to "Heil Hitler"
- nwallin 3y ago> I'll choose the model "Enigma M3" and use the following settings: Well it's obviously not that. The M3 was the 1934 design. In 1942, the German Navy replaced the M3 with the M4, which was incompatible with the M3. This message was sent in May 1945, just days before the end of the war. Is this a ChatGPT delusion? Please don't do that here.
- DrNosferatu 3y agoBing Chat output. Quite hallucinated, isn’t it?
- ibharath462 3y agoOnce in college we ran an online treasure hunt where the participant needs to decode from images, text hidden in source code. Decoding using enigma was our last question. The word "That's all folks" was encoded in five different ways & configuration for enigma machine would keep changing according to the time of the day. We took reference from computerphile videos & people really loved solving this. We redirected them to an online enigma decoder (Forgot the link) Good old times :-)
- dudeinjapan 3y agoASUKAUNDREISINDHERZIGABERMISATOKATSURAGIISTBESTEMADCHEN Message decrypted but what could it possibly mean?? Raises more questions than answers...
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoI'm not sure they had giant mecha back then.
- another2another 3y agoIt means he's just back from Japan and MISATOKATSURAGI is the best lady he's ever met. UND REISIND HERZIG ABER MISATOKATSURAGI IST BESTE MADCHEN.
- dudeinjapan 3y agoFun fact: The Japanese had a technologically superior encryption machine to Enigma which the Allies dubbed "Purple". Unfortunately, the operators made several blunders which defeated the encryption, among them habitually beginning each message with "I have the honor to inform Your Excellency". https://ovid.cs.depaul.edu/Classes/CS233-W04/Papers/PurpleMagic.pdf https://ovid.cs.depaul.edu/Classes/CS233-W04/Papers/PurpleMa... Japan today still hasn't fully grokked how encryption works, as evidenced by the widespread corporate practice of "PPAP", which means sending sensitive info as a password-protected zip file via email, then sending the plaintext password in a separate email to the same recipient address. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPAP_(%E3%82%BB%E3%82%AD%E3%83%A5%E3%83%AA%E3%83%86%E3%82%A3) https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPAP_(%E3%82%BB%E3%82%AD%E3%83...
- Jemm 3y ago[flagged]
- 65a 3y agoCrib with Doenitz, the timing is right, and a naval message would make sense.
- lhoff 3y agoSeeing this website here made me chuckle. Mr. Hörenberg was a teacher at my school. He once held a "guest lecture" within my CS class where he told us about his hobby of breaking engima codes and how his software worked. He once used multiple of our schools computer rooms during summer break to run his software. Luckily for him, we had CAD classes and therefore appropriate workstations. Some of it is explained here: https://enigma.hoerenberg.com/index.php?cat=Breaking%20the%20M4&page=How%20to%20break%20the%20ENIGMA%20M4 https://enigma.hoerenberg.com/index.php?cat=Breaking%20the%2... (A funny sidenote was that he wasn't and admin in our school and had now way of deactivating the screensaver then to walk from desk to desk every 14 minutes and move the mouse.)
- oefnak 3y agoI wonder if they know that domain means "Whore Mountain" in Dutch.
- mohit-agarwal 3y agoChatGPT decodes this to "MEETATTHETOPSECRETLAB"
- 6d6b73 3y agoThat message could be using a new cypher that Klaus Schwab, Hilter's secret kid, is using at WEF to communicate with his buddies in a secret Nazi base in Antarctica
- laurensr 3y agoIt's unfortunate how the Wikipedia article [1] about the Enigma does not mention Alan Turing at all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
- neverartful 3y agoHas anyone tried "Mehr Ovomaltine trinken!"? (Drink more Ovaltine!)