Enigma Cryptograph 19 18, German inventor Arthur Shelbius and his friend Richard Ritter founded Shelbius and Ritter Company. This is an enterprise specializing in transforming new technologies into applications, much like high-tech companies now, with great profits but great risks. Shelbius was in charge of research and development, keeping up with the new trend at that time. He studied electrical applications in Hanover and Munich, and one of his ideas was to replace outdated encryption methods of pencils and paper with twentieth-century electrical technology. The encryption electronic machine invented by Shelbius is called ENIGMA, which will prove to be one of the most reliable encryption systems in history in the following years, and its users will be destroyed by blind optimism about this reliability. This is another story, not to mention it for the time being. Enigma looks like a box full of complex and exquisite components. But if we open it, we can see it can be broken down into very simple parts. The following figure is a schematic diagram of its most basic part. We can see its three parts: keyboard, rotor and display screen. In the photo of ENIGMA above, we can see that below the horizontal panel is a keyboard with 26 keys, and the keyboard arrangement is close to the computer keyboard we are using now. In order to make the message as short as possible and more difficult to decipher, spaces and punctuation marks are omitted. We only drew six keys in the schematic diagram. In the physical photo, the display screen is above the keyboard and consists of 26 small lights with the same letters. When a key on the keyboard is pressed, a small light corresponding to the encrypted cipher text of this letter will light up on the display screen. Similarly, we only drew six small lights on the schematic diagram. Above the display are three rotors, the main parts of which are hidden under the panel. In the schematic diagram, we only draw one rotor for the time being. The keyboard, the rotor and the display are connected by wires, and the rotor itself integrates 6 wires (26 in real objects) to correspond the signals of the keyboard to different small lights of the display. In the schematic diagram, we can see that if the key A is pressed, the light B will light up, which means that A is encrypted into B. Similarly, we can see that B is encrypted into A, C is encrypted into D, D is encrypted into F, E is encrypted into E, and F is encrypted into C, so if we input coffee in turn on the keyboard, DBCE will be displayed on the display screen in turn. This is one of the simplest encryption methods. Each letter is replaced by another letter in a one-to-one way. This encryption method is called "simple password replacement". An amateur finally cracked the Enigma cipher text left over from World War II with the help of the Internet. Although the radio communication between the German armed forces and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been gradually mastered by the allies since 194 1, by 1942, Germany suddenly replaced a new Enigma cipher machine, which caused great trouble to the allies, making it impossible for the allied anti-submarine forces to track German submarines. At one time, the gross tonnage of this sunken cargo ship exceeded that of shipbuilding, although the allied cryptographers stationed at blakely Manor later succeeded in cracking the new Enigma code. Now, a German amateur used thousands of personal computers to form a grid computing cluster through the Internet, and solved one of them. Stefan Kela is a violinist born in Germany. His hobbies are studying cryptography and open source software. 1995, password monthly published three ciphertexts, which aroused his great interest, but he knew that he was not a professional and it was obviously unrealistic to fight alone, so he wrote a cracking program and sent it to the news group post to see if he could attract like-minded people to help him. Soon, 45 like-minded amateurs gathered around him, who were willing to contribute their computers to crack. Krah uses the computing power of these personal computers to form a grid computing cluster based on the Internet, which is used to crack the ciphertext that has been dusty for half a century. Krah named this project "M4", which is the model of Enigma password used to encrypt this information. Soon, in Krah's own words, "the number of computers participating in the M4 project increased exponentially". * * * About 2,500 computers participated in this project. All he had to do was raise his arms and shout in newsgroups and mailing lists. Finally, after a month and a few days, one of the ciphertexts was deciphered. The unencrypted ciphertext is as follows: "nczw vusx pnyminhz xmqx sfwx wlkj ahsh nmco ccak uqpm kcsm hkse inju sblkiosx ckub hmll xcsj usrr dvkohul wccbgvli yxeo ahxr hkkfvdre. Wezl xoba fgyu jquk grtvukam eurbveks uhhvoyha bcjw makl fklm yfvnrizr vvrt kofdanjm olbg ffle oprg tflv rhow opbe kvwm uqfm pwpa rmfhagkx iibg "solution The secret text is as follows: "After being attacked by a deep-water bomb, dive in an emergency, and the last contact position with the enemy is: 0830h AJ 9863；; 220 degrees (direction), 8 knots (speed); I am following (the enemy); (pressure reading)14mbar; (wind direction) north-north-east; (strength) 4; Visibility 10 "Compared with wartime records, it can be seen that this message was sent by Captain Hartwig Locks of German Navy U264 (gross sunken tonnage 14000 tons) on1942165438+1October 25th. Stefan Krah said that his cracking program combines brute force cracking and logical calculus, which can better simulate the arrangement and combination of the rotor and terminal board of Enigma cipher machine. Blakely Manor has completed its historical mission, and those undeciphered ciphertexts are finally left to amateurs like Stefan Kla. Ralph Erskine, who published these ciphertexts in Password Monthly, said: "I think they should be particularly proud of this."