Enigma-Cracking Bombe Recreated 131
toxcspdrmn writes "Volunteers at Bletchley Park have recreated a working replica of the electromechanical bombe used to crack the Germans' Enigma encryption. The bombe was designed by Polish cryptologists and refined by Alan Turing and colleagues at Bletchley Park. The replica joins a recreated electronic Colossus — generally considered the first electronic computer. Impressive work when you consider that Winston Churchill ordered the originals to be completely destroyed at the end of WWII."
Marian Rejewski (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bobme (Score:3, Informative)
In the history of cryptography, a bombe was an electromechanical machine used by British and American codebreakers to help break German Enigma machine signals during World War II. The bombe was invented by Alan Turing with an important refinement suggested by Gordon Welchman. Using the Turing-Welchman bombe, the Allies were able to read a high proportion of the German Enigma traffic, and it was the primary tool used for this purpose.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe [slashdot.org]
Url (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Turing Bombe emulator? (Score:4, Informative)
ahref=http://homepages.tesco.net/~andycarlson/enig ma/enigma_j.htmlrel=url2html-10809 [slashdot.org]http://homepages .tesco.net/~andycarlson/enigma/enigma_j.html>
There's others. Check the Wikipedia entry
Re:Marian Rejewski (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Deserved honour, indeed. (Score:5, Informative)
One of the worst things Churchil did was not allowing the continuation of this project and continual research in the field. As an English man and a Conservative I feel thats been one of our worst own goals... Silicon Vally could have been in Kent (or, even better, Grimsby!). But then again we did something similar to Babage and his difference engine.
Still, it's nice to see what some of the greatest people in the world at the time did in their field, even if it does bring up old regrets...
Re:Marian Rejewski (Score:5, Informative)
It is even less well known that Turing's Bombes were unable to solve the 4-wheel Naval Enigma. The 4-wheel Naval Enigma was actually solved by engineers working for NCR in Dayton Ohio, led by Joe Desch. Their contributions were classified until the mid-90s, and so were not well known. See:
1) http://www.daytoncodebreakers.com/ [daytoncodebreakers.com]
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Desch [wikipedia.org]
Re:Marian Rejewski (Score:5, Informative)
However, although Turing/Welchman's bombe paid explicit homage to the Polish work in the choice of name, its task was fundamentally different. The bombe provided a means to look for message settings based on the cipher text and conjectured plain text. Its weakness was the requirement for plain text, which was a massive task to obtain through traffic analysis of sterotyped messages, `kisses' with broken systems such as the Dockyard Key, weather reports transmitted in other cipher systems and so on. Its strength was that it was independent of the indicator system, which was one of the easier things to change in the Enigma system.
The Polish contribution lay in the machines themselves, the analysis of the indicator systems and the bomba (bomby? spelling may be wrong): together they showed other people that Enigma could be attacked, and provided a plentiful supply of cribs. Had the Poles not succeeded, it's unlikely that the British could have got the resources for their work. But to claim that the Polish work was the basis for the Bletchley work subsequent to the changes in the indicator system is not right.
And, if we're being picky, there might have been the odd vacumn tube in the implementation of the diagonal board's ``all on or none on'' algorithm. But bombes were essentially mechanical devices. The four-rotor ones must have been amazing to be near...
ian
Re:Collossus is not a computer (Score:1, Informative)
Not the first electronic computer (Score:3, Informative)
Please see this chart [wikipedia.org] before making such claims. It is only the second electronic computer but the first programmable electronic computer.
Pictures hard to come by (Score:5, Informative)
To See or not to See (Score:2, Informative)
The bombe's were built in Dayton (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.daytondailynews.com/search/content/pro
Re:American bombe bigger than UK bombe (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Deserved honour, indeed. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, he did allow continuation, it's just that it was under ultratight security in a department that would become today's GCHQ (Government Communications HQ - our equivalent of the NSA). The reason for that security is obvious; he wanted Britain to keep the competitive advantage of being able to spy on friends and allies without anyone being aware of that ability. Go and read up on the history of British SIGINT during the post war years if you're interested. There's a fair bit on Wikipedia about GCHQ and it's precedessor, the Government Code and Cipher School (Bletchley Park to you and me).