Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff Works dot Com, Guten Talk,
Speaker 1: when Hair's List vote coming by Tectoic. My noma is
Speaker 1: Chris Polette when Ish been redact to her by how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com, zits in Mary Gegan uber v
Speaker 1: m R is senior text. Here in Jonathan Strickland at
Speaker 1: vas Dance Zing is I'm lied fur dis vonn no
Speaker 1: loft balogne. Yeah. The predominance of German today is probably
Speaker 1: confusing some people. H The best part is see Jonathan
Speaker 1: hear from Europe. Jonathan never tells me what quote he's
Speaker 1: gonna do, and uh I didn't tell him. I was
Speaker 1: going to do the introduction in German. This time I
Speaker 1: actually switched my quote. Okay, so when you as I
Speaker 1: heard you speaking Germans like, oh no change, Uh, he
Speaker 1: changed the play on me. So anyway, today we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about um. Something that actually came to mind
Speaker 1: when during the process of recording our episode on quantum computers,
Speaker 1: which were led to a discussion of quantum cryptography and
Speaker 1: cryptography is something that actually fascinates probably just about all
Speaker 1: of how stuff works dot Com considering UM, and it
Speaker 1: also comes to play it touches on another podcast topic
Speaker 1: that we tackled months and months ago, Mr. Touring. Oh yes,
Speaker 1: Alan Touring is gonna come up, and it's very important
Speaker 1: in this discussion as well. We're talking about the specifically
Speaker 1: the Enigma machine, which was a cipher machine used by
Speaker 1: Germany during World War Two. Yeah. The funny thing is, UM,
Speaker 1: if you've watched any history or read any history about
Speaker 1: World War two and UH specifically the war between Germany
Speaker 1: and the Allies, UM, you have a sense of what
Speaker 1: this machine meant to the German war effort. But the
Speaker 1: thing is, what I don't think comes across in a
Speaker 1: lot of those UM discussions is that there's no one
Speaker 1: Enigma machine, and it certainly wasn't unknown to the world
Speaker 1: before that because the the Enigma goes back years before
Speaker 1: the start of World War Two. It was actually a
Speaker 1: commercial machine used to encrypt messages. And in fact, because
Speaker 1: it was a commercial machine, it gave some people a
Speaker 1: leg up on on figuring out how to crack the
Speaker 1: code because it was generally considered to be a practically
Speaker 1: uncrackable code if you were to follow the most careful
Speaker 1: security procedures possible. And we'll get into why that is.
Speaker 1: But before I think, before we jump into what the
Speaker 1: machine did and what how it did it, we need
Speaker 1: to talk a little bit just about cipher's in general. Please.
Speaker 1: All right, So a cipher really, and in this case
Speaker 1: we're talking about creating a coded message, and uh, there
Speaker 1: are different ways of doing this, lots different ways. You
Speaker 1: can create a new alphabet, you can try and hide
Speaker 1: things and images. That's called agraphy, right where What you
Speaker 1: can also do it is hide messages within a file,
Speaker 1: like like the code for a file. So I could
Speaker 1: send a seemingly harmless file to Chris, but if you
Speaker 1: were to actually look into the code of that file,
Speaker 1: hidden there, not displayed in any form of executable function,
Speaker 1: might be a message. So there are lots of different
Speaker 1: ways of getting secret messages across, but a very common
Speaker 1: one is using a cipher where you replace one letter
Speaker 1: of the alphabet with another. All right, So the very
Speaker 1: basic version of that is a mono alphabetic substitution cipher.
Speaker 1: It means you're using just the one alphabet and that
Speaker 1: one letter is always going to represent another letter always
Speaker 1: in that cipher. Oh yeah, my friends and I used
Speaker 1: to do this back in you know, grade school. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know we we would say, okay, so every letter,
Speaker 1: you know, the letter A is represented by the letter
Speaker 1: D and it just goes down the alpha that like that.
Speaker 1: You've just shifted the alphabet to the to the right
Speaker 1: a couple of places, sure, like that, and then you
Speaker 1: just go from there. And so in order to to
Speaker 1: decode this, if you're not just trying to crack it,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're actually decoding it, like you're the
Speaker 1: person who is supposed to receive this message, you would
Speaker 1: need to know which letter you know, how far over
Speaker 1: did the alphabet shift? Right, So if if A is
Speaker 1: B and B s C and C is D, then
Speaker 1: you know, all right, well it's a. It shifted one place,
Speaker 1: and so I know to shift all these letters back
Speaker 1: a spot so that I can decode this. All right.
Speaker 1: That's your very basic mono alphabetic substitution. Now those are
Speaker 1: easy to crack. It's easy for anyone to crack, yes,
Speaker 1: all right, as long as you know some basic uh
Speaker 1: rules and and tendencies in your native language, you can
Speaker 1: crack these. For example, you can start looking for two
Speaker 1: letters that are like letters that are are doubled up.
Speaker 1: You start looking at those, and then you think, okay,
Speaker 1: which letters in the English language are the most frequently
Speaker 1: paired together? Like two ta s would be an example. H.
Speaker 1: Two teas happen a lot, so that that letter there
Speaker 1: could represent a T. Let me see if that starts
Speaker 1: to fit other things. And you look for patterns, and
Speaker 1: you find these patterns and you can decode things. You
Speaker 1: can make this a little more difficult, actually a lot
Speaker 1: more difficult, depending on how sophisticated you get using a
Speaker 1: polyalphabetic substitution. All right, so there's this one kind of
Speaker 1: cipher called a Vignier cipher. Uh, this is a little
Speaker 1: more complex. Now. In a Vineer cipher, you've got a grid.
Speaker 1: It's twenty six boxes across in twenty six boxes tall.
Speaker 1: All right. On that top level of the grid, you
Speaker 1: have the alphabet spelled out normally A, B, C, D
Speaker 1: all the way to Z. And then on the next
Speaker 1: one you shift that letter over once, so now it's
Speaker 1: B through A. So the last the last one is
Speaker 1: gonna be A. And then you go the next lay
Speaker 1: up level down you shift it over against Now it's
Speaker 1: C through B and do this all the way down
Speaker 1: until you get to Z to A at the very bottom,
Speaker 1: all right, or not zo a zero zero y Um.
Speaker 1: I'm sitting here. I'm I'm mixing myself up now the
Speaker 1: way Vin your cipher's worked as you would have a
Speaker 1: key phrase or keyword, Okay, So it's something that you
Speaker 1: and the person you're writing to have both agreed upon
Speaker 1: in advance. So let's say that for for Chris and I,
Speaker 1: we sit there and we decide text stuff is our
Speaker 1: key phrase. You would look at your grid and you
Speaker 1: would go down that first column. You go all the
Speaker 1: way down to the T column, the column that starts
Speaker 1: the alphabet begins with the letter T. And then let's
Speaker 1: say that my first word is to Chris is going
Speaker 1: to be how d I then look across the top
Speaker 1: of that grid for the H on the very top row.
Speaker 1: All right, So I've got my finger on the t
Speaker 1: oh based on the first column, and I'm looking at
Speaker 1: the H column in the top row, and I find
Speaker 1: the intersection of those two so where the T row
Speaker 1: and the H column meet, and then that letter represents H.
Speaker 1: And then for oh, I go because my key phrases
Speaker 1: tech stuff. I go to the E column or E
Speaker 1: row on the first column. So I look at that
Speaker 1: first column, which is again in alphabetical order, so it's
Speaker 1: A B, C, D E. So I go to the
Speaker 1: E row and then I look for the O in
Speaker 1: the top row, and I find the intersection of those, uh,
Speaker 1: the column of O and the row of E. But
Speaker 1: that and that becomes my Oh so Chris, because he
Speaker 1: knows that the key phrases tech stuff, he knows which
Speaker 1: road to look at, and then he looks at the
Speaker 1: encoded letter. He finds that in the in within that row,
Speaker 1: looks up to see what column it is, and that's
Speaker 1: the letter it it decodes into. Now this might sound
Speaker 1: really complex. That's kind of the point. Well, you don't
Speaker 1: want the enemy to decipher your code, because then it
Speaker 1: will learn what you're up to and the element of
Speaker 1: surprise is lost. So this um this method becomes less
Speaker 1: useful if you are starting to encode longer and longer messages,
Speaker 1: because that increases the chance that the enemy or someone
Speaker 1: who is not meant to read the code can figure
Speaker 1: out your key phrase or keyword. And if they figure
Speaker 1: out that keyword, then they've unlocked everything. That's all they need.
Speaker 1: They just need to create a Vinyer cipher graph or
Speaker 1: chart and then use that key phrase to decode what
Speaker 1: you've said. Now, the Enigma machine takes and a similar
Speaker 1: approach to the Vignier cipher and complicates it on a
Speaker 1: massive scale and also automates it. Yeah, because, um, you
Speaker 1: know with any of these codes that the key uh
Speaker 1: is probably the most important part. Um. If you intercept
Speaker 1: a coded transmission and you have no idea how it
Speaker 1: has been enciphered, it's going to take you much longer
Speaker 1: to try to break that code. Um. Whereas if somebody
Speaker 1: on the other end has the key to it, they'll
Speaker 1: be able to decipher it in no time or a
Speaker 1: little bit more than no time. UM. So that's that's
Speaker 1: one of the tricky parts, is I mean you can
Speaker 1: uh you know, during War two they were there were
Speaker 1: all kinds of different ways to send messages, including things
Speaker 1: like one time pads, which is a a pad used
Speaker 1: of paper used with a particular code this is the
Speaker 1: one for this message. And uh. This would be used
Speaker 1: out in the field by agents who couldn't carry something
Speaker 1: like a rotor machine like the Enigma with them. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know. And the thing is if the if you lose,
Speaker 1: if the person on the other end loses the key
Speaker 1: for that particular pad uh, um, it's just gonna take forever.
Speaker 1: But the Enigma was a way to automate this UM
Speaker 1: this process, and this machine, which was first patented nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 1: ended up being pivotal UH in World War Two, both
Speaker 1: for the Germans and well actually the the Axis because
Speaker 1: they did have a Japanese version that they used UM,
Speaker 1: but also for the Allies when they were able to
Speaker 1: figure out how the machine worked, and because it does
Speaker 1: have its own flaws. UM. So let's let's talk about
Speaker 1: what was in an Enigma machine and what it looked
Speaker 1: like and and how it encoded letters UM. Each of
Speaker 1: the machines, going back to the very first one, the
Speaker 1: Enigma A had rotor wheels UM and a keyboard. It
Speaker 1: looks a little uh if you've never seen one of
Speaker 1: these machines, and they all look a little different there,
Speaker 1: Like I said, uh, several different types of machines that
Speaker 1: evolved over time, but all of them had a keyboard
Speaker 1: on it UM arranged in more of a well, at
Speaker 1: first it was an alphabetic fashion and then turn into
Speaker 1: more the German keyboard style, but so kind of like
Speaker 1: a typewriter. Yeah. And the very first one looked a
Speaker 1: little bit like one of the old timey cash registers.
Speaker 1: It was so big, um but yeah, I mean these
Speaker 1: had rotor wheels though, and so you would type a letter,
Speaker 1: let's say A, and depending on the way the rotor
Speaker 1: wheels were set, it would produce a completely different letter. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the way it would produce it as it had
Speaker 1: lamps twenty six lamps, each one uh marked with a letter,
Speaker 1: and the lamp that lit up would be the encoded
Speaker 1: letter for that particular key press. Yeah. They use were
Speaker 1: the ones used in World War Two. The earlier ones
Speaker 1: did not have lamps. Um. But yeah, I mean the
Speaker 1: ones that we're talking about specifically around World War Two.
Speaker 1: That made it easier for the operator to identify which
Speaker 1: letter was being used because these most of these machines
Speaker 1: had no printer. Yeah. Usually you would have two people
Speaker 1: working on both sides of this, both the encoding and
Speaker 1: decoding side. You would have one person who would be
Speaker 1: pressing the keys and another person who would either be
Speaker 1: writing down the letter um, the encoded letter or writing
Speaker 1: down the decoded letter. Because an important part of the
Speaker 1: Enigma machine, and actually one of the reasons why it
Speaker 1: was eventually broken was that it was a device that
Speaker 1: if if you if you type the let's let's just
Speaker 1: say for for argument's sake, that if I type the
Speaker 1: letter A, the letter Q comes up on the lamp. Well,
Speaker 1: if I were to take a second Enigma machine that
Speaker 1: was that was configured the same way as the first one,
Speaker 1: and that's really important. We'll talk more about why that
Speaker 1: is in a minute, and I typed the letter Q,
Speaker 1: the letter A would light up, and then all I
Speaker 1: would have to do, essentially is take my coded message
Speaker 1: that was sent to me, type it out on my
Speaker 1: Enigma machine that is configured the same way that the
Speaker 1: encoded message machines was configured, and then have someone else
Speaker 1: write down which lamps let up, and I have the
Speaker 1: decoded message, except that the people in England were saying, no,
Speaker 1: this is gibberish. It's use and someone says, no, you
Speaker 1: idiots in German. Anyway, the I thought I would make
Speaker 1: you laughing. I thought about that last night and I
Speaker 1: was just waiting to unleash it. Um. So the cool
Speaker 1: thing here is that, all right, So imagine that each
Speaker 1: of these roters. Think of it like a cylinder. Okay,
Speaker 1: So imagine a cylinder and on the the on the
Speaker 1: ends of the cylinder are rods and contact points. So
Speaker 1: there's rods on one side and contact points on the other. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is where an electrical current can flow through. Now
Speaker 1: there are twenty six rods and twenty six contact points,
Speaker 1: so there's one for each of the letters the alphabet. Now,
Speaker 1: if you were silly, you would just wire these straight across,
Speaker 1: so a would all position one would would also would
Speaker 1: be a straight wire from the rod to the contact
Speaker 1: and position one. Now, of course that's not the way
Speaker 1: the Enigma machine works. What happened was they wired it
Speaker 1: so that position one would go to a different contact
Speaker 1: on the other side. So position one might go ton
Speaker 1: like Rod one might go to contact twelve. Rod two
Speaker 1: might go to contact twenty three. Rod three might go
Speaker 1: to contact one. That kind of thing. And you had
Speaker 1: this massive wires inside the rotor that determine which ones
Speaker 1: went to what, And then the rotor would fit inside
Speaker 1: the Enigma machine, which would uh electricity from a battery
Speaker 1: would come through, and depending on what key you pressed,
Speaker 1: that would allow the pathway to go through to a
Speaker 1: certain rod. The the electricity would go through the wire
Speaker 1: in the rotor come out the side of the contact
Speaker 1: that again is not directly across from the position of
Speaker 1: the rod. And that's the basic idea of how it
Speaker 1: would substitute a letter. Now if it if the rotor
Speaker 1: did not turn, or if there were not more rotors,
Speaker 1: you would just have a mono alphabetic substitution, like every
Speaker 1: time you type A, the letter Q would light up
Speaker 1: if nothing else changed, if that all it did, in
Speaker 1: which case it would have been a useless machine because
Speaker 1: people would have been able to break that without ever
Speaker 1: having to spend more than a couple of hours on
Speaker 1: a on a on a message. Now, a lot of
Speaker 1: the machines, UM, we're using three rotors. UM. Now here's
Speaker 1: here's where this makes it more complex. Uh. These machines
Speaker 1: came with five rotors uh named numbered with Roman numerals
Speaker 1: UM and every here here again here's part of the key. UM.
Speaker 1: The German command would send out the monthly use of wheels.
Speaker 1: So you might put the wheels in for one two,
Speaker 1: so four would be in the leftmost position, one would
Speaker 1: be in the middle, two would be in the right
Speaker 1: most position, and every time the operator presses a letter,
Speaker 1: let's say J the third. Actually, think of this if
Speaker 1: you've ever seen a car odometer that measures the distance.
Speaker 1: The rotor on the right moves one notch every time
Speaker 1: the operator presses a button. So the operator press is J,
Speaker 1: the rotor on the right turns one notch. The operator
Speaker 1: presses N, the rotor turns one notch, and then the
Speaker 1: middle um. Every so often, the middle rotor moves one notch,
Speaker 1: and then again with the leftmost it moves more slowly,
Speaker 1: so as the operators typing the message out, the rotors
Speaker 1: are turning to incipher the message more thoroughly. The idea
Speaker 1: being that you're not repeating the same alphabet to frequently.
Speaker 1: In fact, you it would take you, it would take
Speaker 1: you an incredibly long message to be able to repeat
Speaker 1: pete such an alphabet ah. And that's one of the tricks.
Speaker 1: Eventually it could happen, which is why the Germans limited
Speaker 1: their message length to two fifty characters. So to to
Speaker 1: explain this even further, if I press let's say that
Speaker 1: I just have the one rotor in there, just for
Speaker 1: simplicity sakes, So I've got one rotor in there, and
Speaker 1: if I press the letter A, the letter Q lights
Speaker 1: up because that's just the way the wiring is in
Speaker 1: that rotor. After I pressed the letter A, the rotor
Speaker 1: turns one notch. I pressed the letter A. Well, Q
Speaker 1: is not gonna light up because what's just happened is
Speaker 1: that there's a new rod where the electricity makes contact
Speaker 1: with that rod. It's in position A. The first rod
Speaker 1: was in position one. Now that the rotor has turned
Speaker 1: one notch the rotor, the rod that's in position for
Speaker 1: the letter A is rod too. So instead of Q
Speaker 1: lighting up, maybe J lights up. So you could just
Speaker 1: keep pressing A and a different letter is going to
Speaker 1: light up every time, except for one other exception we
Speaker 1: should point out, which was again something that helped the
Speaker 1: Allies break the Enigma code. They the Germans had decided foolishly,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, that no letter would ever incipher
Speaker 1: to itself. So B can never b B. Yes, so
Speaker 1: if you saw the letter B in a message, you
Speaker 1: automatically knew it wasn't B. So you've just you've just
Speaker 1: and that sounds like it's menace fuel that you've only
Speaker 1: eliminated one option, But that was huge. I mean, without that,
Speaker 1: it would have been so much harder to to decode
Speaker 1: these messages. Now when you add that second rotor in
Speaker 1: uh so, let's say that again, we're gonna go with
Speaker 1: the positions. So the so we have the rods in
Speaker 1: the twenty six positions and the contacts on the other
Speaker 1: side of the cylinder in twenty six positions. Electricity comes
Speaker 1: in through rod one and it's going out through contact twelve.
Speaker 1: Then you have your second rotors. So the second rotor,
Speaker 1: Rod twelve is accepting the electricity, but it's contact that
Speaker 1: the second rotors, Rod twelve is connected to contact UH seven.
Speaker 1: So you've got now something that's going in through contact
Speaker 1: rod one and coming out contact seven. Once it gets
Speaker 1: through the second rotor, you had a third rotor in.
Speaker 1: That makes it even more complicated. So it's like you've
Speaker 1: just added a huge mass of wires to this device
Speaker 1: and it gives it's even more complex. I'm sorry, did
Speaker 1: you say huge massive wires like the scheker Brett. Yes,
Speaker 1: So here's where the massive wires also comes in. There
Speaker 1: was a plugboard that came with many of these Enigma machines,
Speaker 1: not all, but many. Yeah, do you remember if you
Speaker 1: think back to images you've seen of old telephone operators
Speaker 1: when they had to connect a call, they would physically
Speaker 1: take a wire and connect one person and plug it
Speaker 1: into the slot for the other person to make the connection. Well,
Speaker 1: on the Enigma machine, uh they had wires and plugs
Speaker 1: that went from that basically connected the letters. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: in other words, you might connect the letter A and
Speaker 1: the letter J together with A with a wire, which
Speaker 1: means every time you press the letter A, it's acting
Speaker 1: as if you press the letter J. So that add
Speaker 1: added yet another layer of encryption on top of this device.
Speaker 1: Uh So, No, you're no longer send a message to
Speaker 1: contact one, because that would be the one for A.
Speaker 1: You're sending it to different or not contact but Rod,
Speaker 1: you're seeing it to a different rod. Uh so maybe so.
Speaker 1: By setting the alphabet position on each rotor, setting the
Speaker 1: rotors in the particular order, choosing you know which rotor
Speaker 1: you want. Because these rotors, by the way, we're not
Speaker 1: um alf they if you were to look at a
Speaker 1: rotor and turn it and it had the letters on it,
Speaker 1: it would not be an alphabetical order. They mixed up
Speaker 1: the order of the letters to They wanted to make
Speaker 1: it as complex as possible. So depending upon the the
Speaker 1: rotors you choose, the order you put them in, and
Speaker 1: the plugs that you plug into the plug board, that
Speaker 1: would determine what would happen if you pressed any particular
Speaker 1: key at any particular time. Plus, it's in German and
Speaker 1: you're probably transmitting it in morse code, so that's the
Speaker 1: level that you have to get through in order to
Speaker 1: get to that original message. In addition, UM, the German
Speaker 1: Men's tended to break up messages into regular patterns of
Speaker 1: UM five characters at a time, so you know, a
Speaker 1: F B Q G space, you know, so the message
Speaker 1: wasn't written out, and so you wouldn't say, okay, well
Speaker 1: this this word has three letters and they're only you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's only so many word that would have three letters,
Speaker 1: and they broke it up so that once you know,
Speaker 1: there was really no way to tell how long the
Speaker 1: word was. So a single word, and remember this is German,
Speaker 1: so these words could be you know, seventy three characters long.
Speaker 1: So a single word might might spend multiple five letters segments,
Speaker 1: so you know, it might begin on letter four of
Speaker 1: this five letter group and then finished three groups later
Speaker 1: down the line, and that might have just been the
Speaker 1: word for I don't know like car um. So uh yeah,
Speaker 1: it just made it made it more difficult, obvious, skated
Speaker 1: the meaning of the original phrase as much as possible.
Speaker 1: So how would you ever decode such a message? Now?
Speaker 1: If you've got it really set up so that everyone
Speaker 1: knows how the how to set up their own particular
Speaker 1: Enigma machine based upon a codebook, you would have to
Speaker 1: have like a codebook that was um given out by leadership. Right,
Speaker 1: you'd have to have someone in charge saying, on this day,
Speaker 1: for all messages that we send out, this is the
Speaker 1: configuration you have to use, because if you didn't have it,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be able to decode it. Right. The German
Speaker 1: command would specify the wheel order and the ring setting
Speaker 1: and the the steckering the crossing Stecker means plug, so
Speaker 1: they called it a plug board. It was Stecker bread UM.
Speaker 1: But the thing is the cipher clerk would uh would
Speaker 1: basically turn the three wheels to a position at random
Speaker 1: whatever he wanted it to be, and then they would
Speaker 1: twice put in the own randomly random text setting or
Speaker 1: message setting UM. And this was the indicator, which is
Speaker 1: six letter character UM. And then you set your wheels
Speaker 1: at that three letter text setting and it would give
Speaker 1: you the UM, the the code that the person who
Speaker 1: would on the other side is supposed to know to
Speaker 1: get through it. UM. The thing is it would always
Speaker 1: have This is another thing that that boggles in mind
Speaker 1: to me, UM, with something with a device this capable. UM.
Speaker 1: They would transmit some things in clear text, like the
Speaker 1: preamble basically say the time of day, the number of
Speaker 1: letters in the text, and things like that that was
Speaker 1: sent and clear. I guess it was necessary, but it
Speaker 1: made it easier to figure out exactly what was going
Speaker 1: on and when it was set. And that turned out
Speaker 1: to be important later. UM. And they would tell you, you
Speaker 1: you know, certain things, UM, you know, and everything came
Speaker 1: out in five letter groups and the indicator, which was
Speaker 1: in six letters. They changed that let later, which made
Speaker 1: it more difficult for the Allies, but still at that
Speaker 1: point it was too late. Yeah. And Uh. It also
Speaker 1: didn't help that, you know, the Allies new to look
Speaker 1: for certain words that would be used over and over
Speaker 1: again in messages. They called them cribs. They would look
Speaker 1: for these cribs or possible cribs and uh, based upon
Speaker 1: just letter groupings and they could, you know, eliminate cribs
Speaker 1: from certain groups of letters. Again, because if a certain
Speaker 1: letter appeared at a certain part of a word and
Speaker 1: it was the same letter that should have been, you
Speaker 1: knew it wasn't that word, right, because of course I
Speaker 1: letters never going encode as itself using an Enigma machine.
Speaker 1: So um, yeah, using these basic rules, it sounds like
Speaker 1: it's astronomical, like the number of things you would have
Speaker 1: to eliminate, and really it is pretty it's a pretty
Speaker 1: big number. But that's where folks like Touring came in.
Speaker 1: They they knew a bit about the Enigma machine already
Speaker 1: because the Enigma, the whole rotor based cryptography device, as
Speaker 1: Chris said, predated World War Two. Yeah, it's not that
Speaker 1: the trick is not getting your hands on a machine.
Speaker 1: It's figuring out how what settings the machine is being
Speaker 1: used to encode so that you can break the message.
Speaker 1: Although it did help because if you got your hands
Speaker 1: on the machine, you could at least find out what
Speaker 1: the wiring was, yes, and you could you could then
Speaker 1: start to eliminate various combinations because you're going to say, okay,
Speaker 1: if it's if it's a Roman numeral one, rotor then
Speaker 1: this position is always going to map to this contact
Speaker 1: and you could start to eliminate things that way. Uh.
Speaker 1: The the over in Poland, there were cryptographers who are
Speaker 1: breaking these codes before World War two broke out, Yes, unfortunate,
Speaker 1: and they had a machine that they would use to
Speaker 1: do that called the Bombay and uh and someone set
Speaker 1: them up the bomba. Yeah. Actually they when war broke
Speaker 1: out and it became obvious that things were uh, that
Speaker 1: it was going to be discovered that they were able
Speaker 1: to do this, the machine was destroyed, which is some
Speaker 1: of the Some of the code breakers made their way
Speaker 1: over to England and helped the English code breakers by
Speaker 1: adding to the level of knowledge about what the Enigma
Speaker 1: machine was and how it worked. They also had some
Speaker 1: breakthroughs that stemmed just from from luck and and uh
Speaker 1: and bravery really because we're talking about uh times where
Speaker 1: where Allies captured a German group that had an Enigma machine,
Speaker 1: often something like a submarine. Um they would capture that
Speaker 1: and if they were able to, they could get the
Speaker 1: machine and the codebook, which would essentially tell them pretty
Speaker 1: much everything they needed to know. But uh, meanwhile, Touring
Speaker 1: was working on his own BOMBA. Yes, he was UM. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Before we go into UH into that, I want to
Speaker 1: point out that we left out there. There's more to
Speaker 1: the Enigma machines UM than we really went into, and
Speaker 1: I would recommend if you're interested in learning more UM,
Speaker 1: there's a website for UH, the Crypto Museum, which is
Speaker 1: in the Netherlands. It's a virtual museum, but crypto Museum
Speaker 1: dot com UM will tell you probably everything you ever
Speaker 1: wanted to know about the Enigma machines and UH and
Speaker 1: more UM. But we wanted to talk about the the
Speaker 1: attempts to break that the Navy, by the way, that
Speaker 1: was the three rotor machine was the one used by
Speaker 1: the Army Air Force. The Navy had a four wheel machine, yes,
Speaker 1: which was even more complex, and the the Secret Service UH,
Speaker 1: the people who were in the the high Intelligence groups
Speaker 1: used a completely different machine. Were not completely different, but
Speaker 1: UH used even more difficult machine to crack UM than that,
Speaker 1: and they all had different variations on that. And in general,
Speaker 1: the Navy tended to practice better security measures and UH
Speaker 1: made it. It made it much more challenging to break
Speaker 1: that code. The Army and Air Force, by contrast, were
Speaker 1: not as as careful and so their codes were broken
Speaker 1: faster than the Navy's UM. It's you know, part of
Speaker 1: part of decoding the the Enigma machine came into figuring
Speaker 1: out the wiring of the system, and part of it
Speaker 1: came from, you know, more traditional cryptographic approaches where you're
Speaker 1: looking for patterns and you're looking for a key phrases,
Speaker 1: and you're looking for uh things that could indicate that
Speaker 1: UM that you've stumbled onto something. So if you if
Speaker 1: you receive several coded messages, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: problems is that we think of of decoding as you
Speaker 1: get one message and you're trying to figure it all
Speaker 1: out based on that one message. There were hundreds of
Speaker 1: messages sent. So if you have hundreds of messages sent
Speaker 1: and you're working under the assumption that everyone has is
Speaker 1: using the same basic layout for their Enigma machine, you
Speaker 1: start looking for patterns, and if you find enough patterns,
Speaker 1: you might say, oh, all right, well, look these these
Speaker 1: two messages here start with the same essentially the same
Speaker 1: UH patterns. So that may suggest that they're both starting
Speaker 1: with the same word. So let's start working back. And
Speaker 1: it may even be when I'm talking about patterns, I'm
Speaker 1: not even necessarily talking about the same ciphered letters. Because
Speaker 1: again if if if German A has set rotors to
Speaker 1: a certain alphabet setting to start off, and German B
Speaker 1: has chosen a totally different set, Uh, you're looking again
Speaker 1: at the actual pattern of of letter occurrence, not which
Speaker 1: letters they are. Yeah. It also helps to have a
Speaker 1: thorough knowledge of German, much more than my one year
Speaker 1: and in high school enabled me to UH fake my
Speaker 1: way through that greeting. UM. No. They also look at
Speaker 1: contact analysis, which is basically how frequently one letter will
Speaker 1: be next to another in a language. So if you
Speaker 1: know UH German, then you're able to know certain things
Speaker 1: about the way UH certain words are more common than
Speaker 1: other certain letter formations. So I think in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, UM, until the Allies were able to get
Speaker 1: ahold of UH, you know, more thorough UM code cracking materials.
Speaker 1: I think the traditional code breaking tools like cribs and
Speaker 1: UH and contact analysis were probably very helpful to them. UM.
Speaker 1: But what's really funny to me is in in doing
Speaker 1: my research, I was reading about John Harrible UH, the
Speaker 1: Cambridge mathematician. He was twenty one years old, UM, and
Speaker 1: he was looking to UH to get into the cipher
Speaker 1: known as red UM that the Germans had used. And
Speaker 1: what's funny to me is he actually stumbled upon something
Speaker 1: that we look at on that we've actually sort of
Speaker 1: talked about on the show, and we've talked about passwords. UM.
Speaker 1: He figured that at some point UH, they were going
Speaker 1: to get lazy and stop changing things and stop changing
Speaker 1: the keys that people would use for their u UM,
Speaker 1: the codes that they would use at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the message to tell you which rotor settings. Basically, people
Speaker 1: would start using UH the name of their dog or
Speaker 1: their girlfriend to start encoding the messages, and they were
Speaker 1: going to start leaving it there. Once the first message
Speaker 1: of the day was sent. They're not going to change
Speaker 1: it for every message anymore because they're in a hurry
Speaker 1: or they're lazy and they're not going to change it.
Speaker 1: And at first UM apparently this didn't They were abiding
Speaker 1: by the rules, they were doing things the way they
Speaker 1: were supposed to. But as soon as people became complacent
Speaker 1: and started leaving that setting throughout the day, once they
Speaker 1: had cracked the first message of the day, they were
Speaker 1: set and they were able to they could identify this
Speaker 1: and they basically asked for all the messages sent across
Speaker 1: all of the machines for the first one of the day.
Speaker 1: And once they were able to do that, um, they
Speaker 1: were able to crack read and basically identify what was
Speaker 1: going on for the entire days communications. And that happened
Speaker 1: around or so um, which was fairly early four I
Speaker 1: mean it was before the Americans got involved, but of
Speaker 1: course Europe had been embroiled in war for a while
Speaker 1: at that point. Um. But that's a pretty that's one
Speaker 1: of those things where we tell you not to be
Speaker 1: careless with your passwords, and you know, even back then,
Speaker 1: it's just sort of ironic to me. Yeah, it's interesting. Um.
Speaker 1: The you know, it's you're talking about a device that
Speaker 1: once you start to encode the message, that's a very
Speaker 1: time consuming process, you know, setting your device the proper
Speaker 1: way and then starting to actually encode it and to
Speaker 1: confirm that you know, you that the letters you are
Speaker 1: writing down are indeed the correct ones based upon that configuration.
Speaker 1: It's the longer the messages, the longer it is going
Speaker 1: to take to encode. And that means that the greater
Speaker 1: the span of time between when the message was written
Speaker 1: and when the message is received becomes and that that
Speaker 1: all of that I think leads to that sort of
Speaker 1: lazy behavior because you don't want to uh uh, you know,
Speaker 1: suffer problems because you were too slow. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean there were a lot of different reasons why this happened,
Speaker 1: and I think a part of those just because it's
Speaker 1: such a huge pain in the butt. But that's the point.
Speaker 1: I mean, if cryptography wasn't a pain in the butt,
Speaker 1: then there will be no secrecy there. You have to
Speaker 1: make it difficult enough so that the message remains safe.
Speaker 1: So once we started getting tired of going to those pains,
Speaker 1: there's no more safety. Yep, yep um. But yeah, we
Speaker 1: we talked about Alan turing Um and he invented a
Speaker 1: machine known as the the van Barismus Um, which I
Speaker 1: don't know why I called it that um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: Basically it was able to identify patterns in the text
Speaker 1: messages and that just made it faster for the Allies
Speaker 1: to be able to track things down. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: his machine was capable of decoding a Enigma message within
Speaker 1: something like fifteen hours, which sounds like it's a long time,
Speaker 1: but when you're talking about eliminating all those possibilities, it's
Speaker 1: pretty incredible, especially you're talking you know this is this
Speaker 1: these are the developments that led into computers, and that
Speaker 1: this predates computers, but these devices sort of became the
Speaker 1: precursor to the computer. And you know, it's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why we talked about touring being a father
Speaker 1: of of computing and computer science because it's this sort
Speaker 1: of stuff that that led to computers in the first place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they I think. Also one of the misconceptions is said
Speaker 1: that the machine known as Colossus was used in breaking
Speaker 1: the Enigma ciphers, and that actually is not true. UM.
Speaker 1: Colossus is frequently were referred to as one of the
Speaker 1: first electronic computers UM, but it was actually used to
Speaker 1: break the Lorenz cipher system, which is another a different
Speaker 1: machine UM that was used by the German Army High
Speaker 1: Command UM and Lorenz is the name of a company
Speaker 1: and they basically had been working on a completely different
Speaker 1: type of machine UM that did not use the Enigma codes. UM,
Speaker 1: but yeah, they used UM. The British used Colossus to
Speaker 1: uh figure out the Lorenz system. UM. But yeah, that
Speaker 1: that actually is the machine that we talked about back
Speaker 1: in our UM chip Tunes podcast when pixel hate was
Speaker 1: had been allowed into the Bletchley Park Museum to record
Speaker 1: the mechanical relays. And of course, uh, today's computers uh,
Speaker 1: in terms of processing power could do the work that
Speaker 1: these machines did in scant a fraction of what the
Speaker 1: time needed to do that then, but um, and can
Speaker 1: more thoroughly encrypt messages. I mean, even the freeware tools
Speaker 1: that you can get now to encrypt email are more
Speaker 1: thorough than than these machines were. But still very fascinating stuff. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and um, yeah, it was really I would love to
Speaker 1: actually get a chance to to see one of these devices,
Speaker 1: and there aren't quite a few of them, many in
Speaker 1: museums and things like that. Um, but I've never actually,
Speaker 1: I mean I've seen plenty of pictures, but I've never
Speaker 1: actually seen one of these devices. Uh, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of curious, want to play with one a little bit,
Speaker 1: kinda kind of I don't want to lie, you can interesting.
Speaker 1: I don't know that I could write it in German,
Speaker 1: but anyway, the Yeah, it's a neat, neat device, and
Speaker 1: it really kind of speaks to human ingenuity on both sides,
Speaker 1: both to try and keep messages secret and the determination
Speaker 1: to to find out what that secret message actually is.
Speaker 1: Really kind of interesting, So I guess that kind of
Speaker 1: wraps up this discussion about the Enigma machine. If you
Speaker 1: guys want to know more about either the the the
Speaker 1: Enigma machine, or perhaps some other topic of very specific
Speaker 1: device that you just think needs its own episode, let
Speaker 1: us know. Send us a message on Facebook or Twitter.
Speaker 1: You can find our handle there it's Text stuff HS
Speaker 1: double you, or you can send us an email that
Speaker 1: addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and
Speaker 1: Chris and I will talk to you again for really soon.
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