3 ms·

My very first (self choosen) real software project in school was a simulated replica of the Enigma, but it is of course way cooler, to have something that you c

by lukan 3y ago

My very first (self choosen) real software project in school was a simulated replica of the Enigma, but it is of course way cooler, to have something that you can print out to actually physically put together. "Or how else are we going to send secure messages in the future?" And you could probably also market it as quantum secure, you know, there probably can't be a bitflip due to cosmic radiation .. (isn't this what quantum computers are doing? /s)

SoftTalker 3y ago
Early versions of unix included a crypt utility based on simulating an Enigma machine. It's funny to look at old man pages and see the warnings change from Methods of attack on such machines are known, but not widely; moreover the amount of work required is likely to be large. to Methods of attack on such machines are widely known, thus crypt provides minimal security.
- eichin 3y ago
  In particular, CBW ("Crypt Breakers Workbench") was a popular curses-based decoder "game" in the late 1980s - it would display a block, you'd start typing known plaintext, and it would constraint-propagate what was possible/impossible given that. (IIRC it took more than one block to recover the key, but it would copy "known wirings" to later pages.) That definitely pushed it into "widely known" and relatively low effort (IIRC crypt(1) is a 256-element rotor, not a 26-element one like actual Enigma; I vaguely recall the symmetry actually made it cryptographically worse :-)
  - Someone 3y ago
    http://www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/cbw.html http://www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/cbw.html leads to https://github.com/AlbertVeli/cbw https://github.com/AlbertVeli/cbw, which says “This git repository is not meant to improve upon cbw, only make it compile on modern UNIX-like systems, like OS X, FreeBSD and GNU/Linux. Current status: Compiling but crashing. You are welcome to help out ;-)” I didn’t check whether ftp://ftp.isc.org/usenet/comp.sources.unix/volume10/cbw/ still exists. It could have the original sources.

by lukan 3y ago

SoftTalker 3y ago

Early versions of unix included a crypt utility based on simulating an Enigma machine. It's funny to look at old man pages and see the warnings change from Methods of attack on such machines are known, but not widely; moreover the amount of work required is likely to be large. to Methods of attack on such machines are widely known, thus crypt provides minimal security.

eichin 3y ago
In particular, CBW ("Crypt Breakers Workbench") was a popular curses-based decoder "game" in the late 1980s - it would display a block, you'd start typing known plaintext, and it would constraint-propagate what was possible/impossible given that. (IIRC it took more than one block to recover the key, but it would copy "known wirings" to later pages.) That definitely pushed it into "widely known" and relatively low effort (IIRC crypt(1) is a 256-element rotor, not a 26-element one like actual Enigma; I vaguely recall the symmetry actually made it cryptographically worse :-)
- Someone 3y ago
  http://www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/cbw.html http://www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/cbw.html leads to https://github.com/AlbertVeli/cbw https://github.com/AlbertVeli/cbw, which says “This git repository is not meant to improve upon cbw, only make it compile on modern UNIX-like systems, like OS X, FreeBSD and GNU/Linux. Current status: Compiling but crashing. You are welcome to help out ;-)” I didn’t check whether ftp://ftp.isc.org/usenet/comp.sources.unix/volume10/cbw/ still exists. It could have the original sources.