Cracking Enigma in 2021 - Computerphile
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as a good starting point on practical Enigma cryptanalysis with modern hardware.
What it is
Dr Mike Pound of Computerphile shows how a modern laptop can crack Enigma, using a ciphertext-only attack based on an older paper. He compares it with the tooling in CrypTool.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2021 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends whiskeytuesday · 2021-09 · on “The Scandalous History of the Last Rotor Cipher Machine”
I would think that the recent computerphile video "Cracking Enigma In 2021" would be a good place to start. [this video]
Recommends gregsadetsky · 2022-04 · on “How did the Enigma Machine work? (2021) [video]”
Super interesting, thanks! This is also a good companion video -- [this video] -- about the feasibility of cracking Enigma "in 2021" i.e. using computational power available to us today. TLDW & AFAIK: it's crackable (just as it was back then, using a bag of approaches & heuristics), but you still couldn't plain brute force an encrypted message today if you didn't have any portion of the plain text, the Enigma was using 10 plugboard pairs, etc. Also see [LINK]
Recommends H8crilA · 2024-05 · on “Interview with Marian Rejewski, the first person to crack Enigma (1974) [video]”
AFAIK the Germans kept improving both the Enigma itself and the procedures for using it. For example there was some specific weakness that the Polish attacks used, but at some point Germans figured it out and "patched" it. By the end of the war they could change the "encryption key" even more often than once a day, whereas before the war they could reuse the same key for many months. The Poles didn't break all Enigma setups till 1939 because one didn't have to it yet to effectively collect intelligence. Also because they hadn't existed yet :) Enigma was actually pretty good, but it had a major design flaw: insufficient diffusion. The YouTube channel Computerphile made a good video on practic
Cites aquova · 2023-06 · on “P1030680: Unbroken Enigma message (U534, 01 May 1945)”
An episode of Computerphile attempted to answer the question - [this video] . TL;DW: With some clever tricks, and the advantage of hindsight, it can be done reasonably quickly on a modern computer.