The Enigma Room
 

I created a thread a fair while ago (about 10 months ago or so) on the same topic, problem was it never kicked off. Anyway, I found an Enigma machine on the internets and thought I might share. I decided to screw around and re-download the enigma machine from here and have some fun with you guys. Let's play a game. Rules;

1. You must give your starting reel. (for example, the one used in my message was AAA)
2. If you change your reflectors and such, you must give details (just provide all the info)
3. If you bridge circuits, tell us which ones you bridged
4. Have fun

My message

Starting reel: AAA
No reflectors or altered reels
No circuits bridged
Message-: ZJNMX QPHWL KEICV XYSTB PPQON WFXXU AYZHX BHADW KXTQQ CJBWC GSBNP UBXWO UTGIS JCVXR FBRIR VPNDS YZOKX UXFMB QBCRZ DXNLB GWVCM LXIVP GVDFF URWPL LQBXY FNSVV IQVON PJLET FZIQD TKPJF XLXGL EUQUT UEGHG NXHZX YPJQZ TWSHH NYKMW JBUYG LFIZJ ZFYMR BTFEB ZWAOQ PDWQV ZAWMT EWEKS KUUJP RYSUA LANAP C

Enjoy :up:

EXTRA!

Manual on how to set it up:
http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/enigmahelp.htm

Code Book for April 2k7 (Thanks P_funk!)
http://files.filefront.com/SUBSIM_20.../fileinfo.html

Code Book for Year (Thanks P_funk!)
http://hosted.filefront.com/PFunkadelic/1947019

Hope i did this right..

use reel ZAB

message is as follows...

BXKBB TAFNM TFSIC SD

Wicked. I was thinking of doing something like this. Lets up the ante for anyone interested.

I used the Enigma Codebook Generator program to create a code book for April of 07.:cool:

Download it here. Its a notepad file.

And read this to figure out how to operate the machine. http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/enigmahelp.htm

I used the Kriegsmarine 4 rotor reflector. The code adds to the chore of decoding significantly.:up:

Now my message.

Following standard procedure for enigma operators there are two key letter groups at the beginning which are important, those being the 4 starting reel letters. After you set up your Enigma machine for today you take the first set of 4 letters and use them as your starting reel. Then you decode the second 4 letter group. The decoded letters form the starting reel for the rest of the message. Complicated enough for you?;)

The operators would select the random starting reel so that it was more random. With these two starting reels you effectively code the code.:doh:

Here goes.

April 27th:
YADT ZENP
FSSY QFMZ TTEK VOZI XMGJ QRKJ CMXV OKEV LSYF ZTYD ZVZO RAUU CV

not sure i understand the plugboard...

in your code book it says for the 27th... for the plugboard settings

BN CW DV ES FI HO JY KU LR PQ

does this mean we should connect B to N, then C to W, then D to V etc etc?

everything makes sense up to that point.

HA! got it! nice work on the codes P_Funk!

No problem.:up:

Glad you got it to work. Now give us a message of your own. You can use the same codebook. And when it hits May, if we're all still doing this, I'll make another one.

LOL Well here you go... although i think you read my mind hahaha

SUWA RLDL

KRHV KLMA XCMH FOQF QGWB DYJG REXU IMWY HSLE LCEE IOLX RQPU KNPH SGPI RGIC YLFX ADUE KAEN COCO VMWF AEPA DVTR KWXB FRNE JIMO SBRR OXLM YQGE WHPK XJPA SKIE EKXU IIIX NLTA FJJA LKFG MIWV

In reply:

KLOP TDZX XHLS QBSD UUZN PAVT HDQP JMMS UCMT AXVE LWFX ZQAD ZUEI MCJE OVGU YKYJ ZEVU PFTW LUPM SAPB GSQA PHRY GLZN TTTZ BO

EDIT. I've created and uploaded Enigma Codebooks for the remainder of 2007 on my filefront page. I also uploaded the Enigma Simulator and the Codebook Generator.

http://hosted.filefront.com/PFunkadelic/1947019

haha i was just 10 minutes ago saying to myself "man this is so cool.... im such a nerd"

P funk, i'm confused, how do I know which tag to use on your codebook?

do I use 27 and the Beta reflector due to it being the 27th today?

I understand how to set everything up, just not sure on which tag to use from your codebook

You use the 27th yes. Its a monthly code book. The column titled 'Tag' is the day.

yay I got it :know:



The scarey part is how complicated the setup for the rotors / reflectors and bridged circuits is. Just one incorrect setting on anything and you are going to get nothing at all. I'm assuming thats a "realistic" setup P funk?

Your coded reel settings for the main message seem to be in line with what the manual says they actually did in real life.

Yes when I found all this a few months ago I did some shallow research into the official procedures for encoding messages. But the way we're doing this is far from the official way. There were actually manuals that explained how to word messages and how to abbreviate certain non-alphabetical symbols.

But I do find this fun enough for the moment.:cool:

Okay just a silly little one here.

DXGK QQAP QQFQ AWWG INC

hmmm, do you do any troubleshooting for the Enigma? :p


I just started decoding Goldenrivet's message - I got this:

"WHY NOT GO AHEAD AND GPVZ JNKX ZRTZ OTHD GQLR UBFR WWBY XGTU VQES SAJX LNAU KQXJ IDPS ECTU DXIM THRM JKNJ RDFA KMPT QOQW OLFJ UAPQ HZES JLJT UJYN HTXY DDZB EDTI XRID QXEE VDWM DLCE "


Edit: disregard,tried again and decipehered it perfectly - no idea what went wrong there.....

The message came out clear for me. I think that you didn`t set up your Enigma machine properly. Because of the nature of it just one plug not right or just one wheel not set up perfectly and the whole order of it is ruined.

Thinking about it and where it went garbled, either a plug isn`t done properly or the 2nd wheel from the right is wrong in some way.

I worked out what went wrong P funk - by the nature of how each rotor works, if I understand correctly, every time you press a letter it turns the relevant rotor one position forward. You can only hit each letter once from the starting order for the message to decipher properly. Here I was thinking in 21st century logic that you could repeatedly press a character as if it were electronic, and it would repeat the same encoding. I'm not sure if that made sense, but I've worked out what I did wrong :p

Basically you cant start trying to decode your message again (if you muck up half way through it) unless the "Walzenlage" are in the correct beginning position.


:lol:

Is it naughty to use the previous message reel code to encode another? :hmm:

RBFD VANC ZJGP BTKM KDME JSIS XQWO ZWSH GKU

What a handy device this machine would be in a military situation.... Had those brits never captured the code books allied intelligence units could have spent several life times trying to figure this thing out. Insane the amount of prep work that goes into a single message.

without the daily codes you would literally be reading gibberish

For the most part, the British *DIDN'T* have the code books. When they did have them, though, it allowed them to read traffic, either back traffic or current.

That gave them the advantage of knowing what to look for. Military messages tend to have strict formats, and they also tend to be stereotyped. If you have a good guess as to what the plaintext might be, you can take a stab at decoding it even if you don't know the key.

The British exploited this by decoding messages in less secure ciphers (such as the 'dockyard' cipher, used by units not important enough to have an Enigma machine) and searching for the plaintext in Enigma messages. Often, they used a technique called 'gardening', where they would sow a minefield of a port on purpose, just to generate warning traffic in both Dockyard and Enigma. They could then search for the text of the Dockyard message in the Enigma messages.

Since in an Engima type machine with a reflector no letter can ever be enciphered as itself, that can help you by making certain combinations of possible rotors and positions impossible for a given plaintext. What you do is take your probably plaintext and slide it past the message, and everywhere there is a match between a plaintext letter and an enciphered one, that is an incorrect orientation. That cuts the 'key space' you have to search considerably.

If you have the wiring of the rotors, you can work out the solution. Even the four rotor Enigma was reasonably easy to defeat given the technology of the day, if you threw enough resources at the problem. There was a blackout of naval Enigma for most of 1942, after the Kriegsmarine switched to the 4 rotor Enigma, but from 1943 onward the Allies were pretty much reading it on a current basis right up until the end of the War.

Now, on the other hand, the US SIGABA and British TYPEX machines weren't broken. They didn't use a reflector, so a letter could be enciphered as itself. In the case of the SIGABA they had more encipering rotors than any Enigma, and they also had a set of rotors that controlled the movement of the enciphering rotors, making it more random instead of the regular movement of the Enigma (which is also a major weakness).

So, while the Enigma has a certain mystique that is undeniable, it was only a mediocre enciphering machine.

Now, there is a technology that was invented around 1921 that could have given the Kriegsmarine complete protection for their communications: The One Time Pad. The OTP consists of a set of random numbers or letters used to encipher a message. Each particular page is used once, then destroyed. If the U-Bootwaffe had used the OTP for it's communications, all the British would have had left is traffic analysis and direction finding. Traffic analysis can develop good intel, but it is tenuous at best, and can't really give you specifics. DF is also good, but it only tells you where a unit is right then, not where they will be in the future so that you can intercept them.

I've often wondered how the Battle of the Atlantic would have turned out if the Germans had decided to implement the OTP instead of Enigma.

you make some good points there, but even WITH the code book its quite a chore to decipher a message... one typo and the rest of the message will not make sense. You could set the rotors to any one of thousands of likely positions and toy with it all day and by the time you managed to break one message the war could be long sence over.

i think for the period the enigma machine was fantastic.

of course one has to consider that the little orphah annie radio show decoder rings of the 1950s like from the movie "Christmas Story" were pretty much just 1 rotor enigma machines :rotfl:basically you would set the rotor to correspond to a specific letter in the master (fixed) rotor. and you would get messages like THIS

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z master reel
W XY Z A B C D EF G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V secondary reel

Message "Z N E G J U T Q N S R W H P E R A"
OR
decoded "D R I N K Y O U R O V A L T I N E"