Hacking Enigma: The Real Story of the "Imitation Game" and Alan Turing

10:43PM Jul 27, 2020

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Hope 2020. We're, our next session today we have Tom Pereira and his son Dan, are going to be talking about the Enigma machine the title of this session is called hacking Enigma, the real story of The Imitation Game and entering and will be available for q&a in the matrix chat and also right after the movie, so we'll see you in just a little while. Stay tuned. Thank you very much.

Hacking enigma. The real story of The Imitation Game with Professor Tom Pereira, and Dan Pereira Enigma museum has been the only organization in the world that hunts for researches restores and provides fully restored and working Enigma cipher machines to museums, historians and collectors for over 40 years, and make my museum found and restored the enigmas that appear in The Imitation Game and Snowden Enigma museum calm also maintains the only list of surviving Enigma machines of the approximately 23,000 German Army and Air Force enigmas only 289 are known to have survived and only 84 of the approximately 1000 German Navy enigmas have survived, calling upon our many years of Enigma research. We're going to tell you how the Enigma works, how, and by whom. Its codes were broken and the real story behind. The Imitation Game, we will end our talk with a description of the greatest intelligence coup in world history,

all branches of the German military used the Enigma machines to hide and encrypt their communications. Starting way, way before the beginning of World War Two in 1939, in about nine in the early 1930s to the Germans started building up their military illegally, and they had to hide this so they use the Enigma machine for that. And then they continued using the Enigma machine throughout World War Two, to hide and encrypt their communications, the Enigma machine was initially patented by the German and vendor, Arthur sure because other people had invented the Enigma machine but he was the first to patent it. The others were similar, but without the patent they could not go forward. He did this in 1918 and his first Enigma failed to sell it was this horrible huge 300 pound cumbersome device that he hoped would be appealing to corporations for their personal internal corporate security. Finally in 1922 he developed a more portable version. And this version he offered to the United States to Europe to the Germans, nobody was very interested in it a couple of people people bought a few out of curiosity, but it was not until the early 1930s when the German military started to build up its, its forces that the Enigma machine was taken over by the Germans and all production then went into the German military until 1945, at which point the Enigma machine was no longer produced after the end of the war, the Enigma machine is a very simple device. This is a coding Enigma machine which means it is developed designed to take a plain text letter such as the letter A, and encode it into a secret ciphertext letter such as the letter age. It does that by typing in when you type in the letter A into the keyboard it closes a very simple electrical circuit very much like that of a flashlight. And the result is that it lights up a light bulb under the letter H and illuminates the letter H. So the plain text letter, a typed into the keyboard produces a ciphertext or a secret version of a, which is the letter H, the way it does this is relatively simple the machine is very simple. There are only a total of 80 wires inside the entire Enigma machine, and we'll learn a little bit about what they do in a moment, the substitution code where you take a plain text letter and change it into a ciphertext started out way before Julius Caesar, but it has been given the Julius Caesar name called the Caesar code, where you take a plain text alphabet just a normal alphabet, and a second alphabet which is the same alphabet and you then slide the second alphabet over by a given number of letters, so that the plain text letter now has an equivalent cipher text letter. You can then convert any plain text letter like the letter E into a ciphertext letter, like the letter L. This technique was also used during the American Civil War, this is an American Confederate States of America code we'll. And if you wanted to encode the letter A at the top of the wheel here into a secret version of a cipher text version. You simply take this rotating center wheel and adjust it to what you would call the days key or the initial key setting. And then you can convert any plaintext letter on the outer ring into a ciphertext letter on the inner ring. If you take that ciphertext letter or word consisting of those ciphertext letters over to another code wheel. And if that code will is set to the same days key or initial setting, then you can decode the message by simply looking at the coded letter on the inner wheel here, and finding out what the equivalent plaintext letter is on the outter with the Enigma machine does essentially the same thing. You type in the letter A. It has changed the alphabet around, and it wiring arranges so that a light bulb lights up under the letter H. Let's look at the circuit and see how it does that, it's a very simple circuit we start out with a battery over here on the right, and we take the battery voltage and pass it through the normally open contacts of the letter, a keyboard key. This carries the voltage over to a plug board on the front of the Enigma which changes the letter A, then over to a letter O, the plugboard wire then goes into a set of three rotating rotors, by way of an entry drum. And these rotors convert the entry letter O into a number of other letters, and at the left end, there is a wired reflector that forces the voltage to come back out through these rotors again. And after all these conversions, it comes out as the letter M letter M goes to the plug board on the front of the Enigma, and is converted over to the letter H by jumper wires on this plug board, and then the letter H is carried electrically through the normally closed contacts of the H key, and this illuminates the H light bulb. So basically we see it's a flashlight with a battery, a switch and a light bulb. And the only thing that's complicated is this circuit consisting of a number of rotating rotors and the settings of the plug board on the front of the enigma. Here's an Enigma machine we type the letter A into the keyboard, and we note that the letter H lights up on the light bulb panel, the letter H then is written down, and it's either sent by messenger or telephone or sent by radio over to a decoding enigma. And that decoding Enigma must be set the same way at the same starting position as the decoding enigma. And here we have a decoding enigma. And in this decoding Enigma we're going to type in the cipher text letter H, and we're going to see it converted back into the original plaintext letter A. So we type the letter H on the keyboard, and the Enigma internal wiring lights up the A. on the plug board on the light bulb. The critical thing is that this decoding and make must be set to the same initial starting key as the encoding enigma. And that means it has the same internal wiring. Let's go through that wiring again we see we go through exactly the same wiring but backwards. In this case we press the letter H key, and the battery in the lower right here, voltages connected to the plug board on the front of the Enigma where it's jumpered over to the letter M. The M enters the stack of rotors goes through the stack of rotors, to a reflector on the left back through the rotors and back out of the stack of rotors, as the letter O, the letter O is then connected over to the letter A. on the plug board, and finally the voltage goes up through the normally closed contacts of the A key, and lights up the A. on the enigma. So we have them a coding Enigma and a decoding Enigma, the coding Enigma as we've seen if we type in the letter A it lights up the H light bulb. The H is then transformed over or carried over to a second and Nick button typed into its keyboard, and when the H is typed into the keyboard, the letter A lights up on the light bulb, and we have now taken the letter A plaintext coded into a ciphertext letter H, and then decoded it back into the letter A again, looking at a slightly more complete diagram of the Enigma let's see in slightly more detail what's going on the battery over on the right here produces a voltage which sits on the normally open contacts have all of the keyboard contact contact. And when a key is pressed, such as the letter A. The contact is connected and it carries the voltage to a pin on the plug board panel on the front of the enigma. In this case the letter A, the letter A is then converted by the plug board over to the letter M. The M goes through a set of wires into the right side of the rotor stack and here we can see the rotor stack a little more clearly. we see that we under the right hand rotor as an M we come out as a bee, we enter the left the middle rotor as a bee and come out as a J, we enter the reflector at the left rotor as a J and we come out into the reflector as an F, out of the reflector as a P. and out of the left rotor as an N, an out of the middle rotor is an X and out of the right rotor as an O, and we eventually find our way down to the plugboard letter O, where this is jumpered over to the letter H, and the H is carried through the normally closed contacts of the H key, and it gets back to the battery and illuminates the letter H. So the wiring is again very simple, just a switch of battery and a light bulb. But the real complication comes in with respect to the rotors up here, the rotors themselves and they change every single time you type in a letter. Every time you type in the letter on the keyboard, the rotors, turn one step at select the odometer on a car the right hand rotor steps once when it's gone 26 times it steps the middle rotor. When the middle of rotor steps 26 times it steps the left rotor, every time they step. It changes the internal wiring of the enigma. So let's see what happens. Here's a coding Enigma are various same old coding enigma. But we've now typed in the letter A a second time on the keyboard, and because the rotor has rotated the letter X is now the coded version of the letter A. And so if we were looking at our set of coding and decoding enigmas. We are now typing in the letter A a second time. The letter X lights up on the light bulb panel of the coding Enigma that's the coded version of the letter a second time. We then type the letter x into the decoding Enigma, which has already decoded once it's now on that second decoding job, and therefore it's exactly identical in its wiring to the encoding enigma. And we type in the letter X, and we get back the letter A. The second letter. So it's very simple setup. The thing that is very interesting, however, is that there are a number of different possible settings of the Enigma that that determine what the day's key is that is used. the day's key involves a number of internal adjustments of the enigma. The rotor number and position along the axle, you can have any one of five rotors and put them in any of these three places in any order. And that is 60 possibilities. The each router has an internal ring setting. Actually 26 ring settings and that gives you 676 possible settings. Each router has an initial starting position that you can see through the little windows on the Enigma there 17,576 so these, and the jumper cable selections on the plug board they're five times 10 to the 15 power big number of possible settings of the plug board which can have anywhere from zero to 13 different cables in there. So, those settings combined. And when you add those all together and figure out what the total number of possible days key settings for an enigma is it comes out to a staggering number of 10 to the 114 power possible individual days keys settings. That doesn't look like a huge number just a few little symbols over here, but if you compare it to the total number of atoms in the observable universe, we find that there are only 10 to the 80 of atoms in the entire observable Universe, and we compare that to the 10 to the 114 power possible days keys and an enigma. We realize that the Enigma has a very complex in their show possible number of settings, the settings or a day's key are given in a codebook that looks like this. On the left we have the days of the month going from day one to day 31. Then we see the type of reflector that's in there then we see the number of the rotors and the order of the rotors. In this case, the leftmost rotor is another rotor for the middle rotor is at two and the right most one is the number one rotor out of a possible five different kinds of rotors. The next column gives us the ring settings for each rotor anywhere from one to 26 for each of the rotors and left to set to 16 metal 22, and right most router to a. The next set of columns tells us where the plug board settings are installed. In this case, a is jumpered over to M. C is Junker d p d the J etc and so on, and that changes as you can see with every day of the month. And finally, on the right are as a way of calculating which of the letters is visible through this window as the starting position of those letters, the head of the U boat command. I am wrong Carla during it knew that his Enigma machines could have 10 to the 114 power possible settings, and therefore he felt very confident that nobody would ever be able to guess at a particular day's key setting, even though he knew that it might be possible for someone to capture a codebook that would only give them their settings for one month, and that's highly unlikely because every codebook was closely, very carefully guarded when it was delivered to the individual Enigma installation. Therefore, Admiral Dunn communicated with every one of his submarines every single day and he demanded demanded that every submarine send back to him. Their latitude and longitude position, every single day throughout the war, having no clue that they allies, we're going to be able to decode those messages and know where every one of their sufferings was located. He knew the Allies would could intercept the messages because they're just radio messages, but he was certain, they would never be able to decode his signals. His u boats were a tremendous danger they stood the possibility of completely isolating Britain, from the rest of the world, and Europe from the rest of the world, and Churchill considered that the U boats were the greatest danger in World War Two, and they were doing terrible things they were sinking a tremendous number of ships. Okay and now we get to the Imitation Game alone comes, Alan Turing to the rescue. And he goes running across the field yelling Heil Hitler Heil Hitler that's the answer and everybody looks over his shoulder. As he finally decodes figures out how to decode an enigma message. Unfortunately this is totally untrue as we'll say in a minute. The only good thing about this picture from our standpoint, is that is the Enigma that we were able to find and restore that was being used in the movie, but Alan Turing was not the first person to decode the enigma. And, or even use the concept of a common phrase in an enigma message. In addition, we see him in this picture with the bomb the Enigma decoding a device that he supposedly built and designed to decipher the enigma. And unfortunately, sorry, Alan. He did not do that. What is the true story of the deciphering of the Enigma well it boils down to three brilliant Polish mathematicians who broke the Enigma codes and built the first bombs, six years before the war started, six years before Turing and Bletchley Park had anything to do with the cipher and the Enigma machines. Poland was sandwiched between two parts of Germany by the Treaty of Versailles and they knew they were going to be attacked by the Germans so they developed a technique for cracking the Enigma code by taking their top mathematicians, led by Marianne riaf ski on the right, and Richard koski, and jersey Roisin key, and they were able to calculate the German military Enigma wire and we'll see what that means in a moment as early as 1932, and they built the first Enigma deciphering bombs and were able to successfully decipher the Enigma messages for six years before the war started, here is an enigma rotor and nobody knew how the rotor input pins on the right, were wired over to the output pins on the left. This is called the rotor wiring maze. And it was up to the three Polish mathematicians and they figured out mathematically, the wiring maze for all of the five different rotors, that were used in the Enigma machine. They then went about building their own Enigma machines that help them in decoding and Nick Moses is a Polish built Enigma machine, and they designed devices to decode the Enigma which they called bombs. The first one on the left here is called a sight kilometer and it's manually operated with three Enigma rotors here and three over here and comparison electric comparisons and switches that indicated, when there was a simultaneous reading between the rotors. On the right, they had put an electric motor in the bomb, and they use the bomb for deciphering the messages no one knows really why they call them bombs. One thought is that the electric motor made a clicking sound like a time bomb. Another is that it's a name of the very popular polish to desert. So it's not clear where that name came from. Here is a Rebuild of the site kilometer. This is the first rebuild that's ever been done successfully. And it was done just this month just in 2020. And here it is a man at Cambridge University built a replica of the site kilometer with Enigma rotors here and nigma rotors over there you can see you can take them out and change them around the way you can inside an Enigma machine, and that device was successful in 1939. When Poland was invaded by Germany, the poles cramped their devices and their plans and they escaped by way of France to England, there we see Poland being completely overrun by Germany, the poles ran over to England and they gave their information the Enigma replicas the bomb plans to Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing was heading. The group dedicated to deciphering the Enigma and Alan Turing took their ideas and their techniques and their devices for D ciphering the Enigma and use those as the basis for his own work on deciphering the enigma. The unfortunate thing is that nobody ever gave the poles credit. So it is not well known that the Poles were the ones who supplied Bletchley Park with the information and the models that allowed them to successfully decipher the Enigma deciphered messages at Bletchley Park were codenamed ultra messages, and they were read in. In plain English, and allowed the allies to know what the Germans were doing throughout the war, 10,000 codebreakers kept their secret of what went on in Bletchley Park for 30 years so nobody even knew what Bletchley Park had been doing. Alan Turing Of course, brilliant mathematician led the efforts at Bletchley Park and once he had the Polish techniques techniques for deciphering the enigma. He went ahead and expanded them and improve them. And he said about building his own bomb and this is known as the Turing Welchman bomb in which again we see rotors, but these are more complex rotors and it's a huge machine electrically operated, very similar in concept to the Polish machine based on the Polish machine, but as you can see a much more complex much much more complex machine. This is an amazing machine if you ever get over to Bletchley Park don't miss having a look inside the Turing Welchman bomb. The Americans also were building bombs. This is the US Navy bomb made by a national cash register company in Ohio, and dedicated to cracking the Enigma code the American code breaking efforts were took place in Arlington Hall, which is near Washington formulated girls school, and they were very successful. Touring them realize that the Germans were getting into more complex coding devices, and he designed a device which he called Colossus, and this allowed very rapid reading of paper tape and nygma encoded messages, it could go into the machine. It was the first to the machine to use thermionic tubes and is considered by many people to pay the initial version of the first programmable computer. Let's look at that here's an NSA book called cryptology his role in the early development of computer capabilities in the United States, and what they're saying is the need to decipher Enigma messages acted as a stimulus for the development of many different devices that ultimately culminated in what we now think of as an electronic computer. The first of these was the Polish side kilometer that we've just discussed, and then the Polish bomb up here, the Turing Welchman bomb over here. The British Colossus that Turing was involved with the American Enigma deciphering bomb. And then other computers evolved from that including the Atlas back in 1954, and the arceau, RCA 501 and 1958. So the Enigma need to decipher the Enigma actor there's a stimulus for all of these activities. What is a computer. After all, can we call any of these machines computer computer is most often defined as a device that has an input, a central processing unit, and then output. Some people like to add on it's got to be electronic or electrical or something. But the basis of a computer is that you've taken input, you do an operation on that, and the computer gives you an output. The computer central processing unit is open to argument most people consider that it must have a preset sequential number of operations like the chips in today's computer they have pre wired to add, subtract and carry kinds of operations, and it has to have a stored program, you have to be able to put a program into a computer, which will then direct the operations to perform operations on an input.

Our question is, have we overlooked the Enigma itself, thinking of the Enigma as the stimulus the catalyst for the development of a computer. What about the possibility that the Enigma itself was a computer. After all, it has an input, its keyboard. It has an output which is its display the light bulb panel, and it has a basic form of CPU, in which nine sequential operations are performed remember the nine conversions, that we saw of numbers and letters on the inside the Enigma machine. Those are fixed sequential operation so those are the operation nine operations of the CPU and the stored program is the day's key you program the computer manually. And that is the stored program. So I would like to posit the possibility that the Enigma itself was the first computer and not the machines that were developed in order to decipher it. If we go with that then we can see the rather funny similarities between the enigma. It looks sort of like a laptop you have a keyboard and a display screen there's a laptop, it looks a little like a notebook, you have the keyboard and the display screen like the old radio shack 100, and it looks a little bit like a smartphone with its keyboard, and its display and its central processing unit, we'll leave that for people, they'll argue about and move on to consider other things Alan Turing's brilliant contributions to all of this word speeding up deciphering by designing these incredibly complicated additional devices and dealing with the German improvements by designing new bombs that were able to keep up with the German changes, turn was helped by a number of things that capture of codebooks themselves from u boats occasionally, not a lot of them but they helped a lot. Repeated predictable words and messages Heil Hitler, and so on, and many other discoveries that you can read about and how the Enigma was coded. Here's a picture of the U boat u 505 being captured and boarded with its code books being removed. And here is a picture of the U 505 being towed, and you can actually go in, you've 505 in the tree cago science museum where it's sitting in all its glory with its Enigma machines deciphering the German Enigma messages had to be hidden from the Germans, which sometimes required the sacrifice of lives. You couldn't let the Germans you knew where and let the Germans know that you knew where every one of their u boats were, or they would have panicked and change their enciphering devices so they hid that in various ways which you can read about we don't have time to discuss and nygma decipher is generally believed to have shortened the war by two years, save thousands of lives and prevented Hitler from completing the atomic bomb in the war over 70% of all of the boats and 70% of the crew were sunk, mostly through and dig Monday ciphering although it turns out that some enigmas were sabotage the Germans were stupid enough to have prisoners of war wiring. Their Enigma machines if you can imagine such a thing is, I don't have any pictures of them wiring enigmas but here's a picture of prisoners of war, building BMW engines and prisoners of war building high tech German rocket guidance systems, and it's fairly clear that they also built Enigma machines. since most of the German workers were off being soldiers, they needed workers. We have found them taking apart many many many and Nicholas signs of sabotage that include a loose plug, which had never been wired so didn't just fall in there inside the Enigma that blocked the operating bar of the Enigma did come down a fishhook that was tucked into the wiring and gradually worked its way into and shorted out the wiring and screws that were too long to properly crimp down the wires. None of these techniques, could be obvious because the Enigma had to pass inspection to get out of the factory. But these devices. These techniques allowed the Enigma to fail in the field. At the end of the war, all of the enigmas were ordered destroyed by Hitler and here's a picture of the Germans, destroying the last of the Enigma and Churchill also ordered the destruction of every Enigma and the bombs and plans for the bombs we don't know why, until finally we came across this very strange enigma. So the nygma with a Hebrew keyboard of all things, which took us two years to figure out what was going on here. And it turned out that the British had actually not destroyed all of the enigmas, they gave 30 of them to Israel, and said why don't you use these machines for your own internal security. They're really secure. They didn't bother telling, Israel, that they machine had been cracked and that they were able to read the messages. Luckily Israel converted them over to Hebrew keyboards, but never actually put them into service, although other countries that that Britain gave enigmas to did put them into service was sort of like a Trojan horse enigmas they're very hard to find these days many, very few of them survived because they were all blown up. You find them occasionally on battlefields. If you dig in the mud you can sometimes find them. Most of them were blown up and look like this horrible thing. And it's very unusual to find that complete enigma. General von mon toufool was cornered, and he surrendered his entire Tank Army to the Americans in order to avoid being captured by the Russians, and he buried his enigmas three feet down in the dirt, as he was being captured. And this one was found by a metal locator was gradually dug out you can see the plugboard coming out of the mud. And here's the Enigma machine itself. And here it is with a little of the mud cleaned off and there's a nigma obviously been hit and damaged in addition to burying it, but the idea was to try and destroy it completely and that's why these things are so hard to find. Sometimes you can find them in lakes if you go diving in lakes with metal detectors here's the parts of an Enigma machine and the German Lake been badly damaged as you can see we studied the damage here and realize that had been actually caused by the butt of a German rifle. And here's a u boat that was sunk off the South Carolina, North Carolina coast, 2352. When you go diving on this u boat it's sitting there and fairly deep water. And if you work your way into the radio room, and grab the enigma. After about 75 years under salt water and then So, looking like this, and this Enigma was actually restored back to working condition so you got pretty desperate when you're looking for Enigma machines. Every once in a while you find some nutcase, who has managed to keep an Enigma machine this guy is rebuilding a measure Smith ma 109 fighter in his garage and they needed a motor, and he called me up and he said you want to trade. An Enigma machine for some money to buy a motor I said sure. And so we ended up with this Enigma machine. Here is our biggest find of Enigma machines. This man, it turns out had three Enigma machines, under a desk in his living room, and you can see 123, the one with the arrow is actually the Enigma machine that appeared in The Imitation Game. So this is the moment at which we first saw the Enigma in The Imitation Game a very exciting moment we restored it brought it back into working condition, and it was used in The Imitation Game, taking a quick look at some of the other cipher machines that were used by the allies, and by other countries, this is the most secure of cipher machines used by the American forces called the cigar Ba, the British used a device called the type x very secure machine. The Japanese, as you probably know, used a purple machine. This is a purple analog built by the Americans to simulate the purple but shame since no actual purple machine was ever recovered. During the Cold War, the Russians developed an enigma like machine which they code named fialkov. It has 10 rotors not just three, and these rotors rotate in different directions so it's an amazingly complex machine, and we get to the American World War Two m 209 cipher machine very simple machine no electricity even just purely mechanical does that conversion, put in the plain text letters on the left here turn them, and then prints out to turn the lever on the right, and that then prints out the cipher text letters up on a piece of paper take the M 209 cipher machine was developed in 1935 sort of in the middle of the Enigma machine, the yellow here shows the, the time of production of the enigma. The hagoan m 209 was developed in 1935. And down here we see World War Two and the Enigma production ended at the same time that world war two ended but pangolins kept on being made all the way up to 2018, not exactly this match the exact machine, but haggle and haggle and company, and subsidiaries crypto ag kept making this machine all the way up into a year or two ago, and 125 different countries, actually took on these machines and bought them from haggling for their own security. Every time a diplomat would come to the United States to the United Nations Conference or a diplomatic conference, they would bring their similar to an M 209 cipher machine with them and radio have the coded messages radio or telephone back to their home country for information so this was the primary device used by all of the political all of the countries in their communications and what none of them knew, none of them knew and that's why I call this a greatest crypto coup in all of history, none of them knew that hagoan had allowed a backdoor to be installed in every one of his machines and the CIA was able to read every single message that was ever encoded by any of the haggling machines. So we're very excited about that discovery it's really just come out in the last year or two. And I believe that is an extraordinary discovery. With that, I just want to mention a couple of things we are a nigma museum.com. If you'd like to contact us we're info at a nigma Museum, calm, or book inside the Enigma gives all the details of what happens in an enigma our lectures and our conferences, try to spread the word about new discoveries about the enigma. And thank you very much for your attention on this. And.

Hello and thanks again for joining us. after that great video on the digging machine. There's so much history was just so incredible to watch the story and then also how you found all the Enigma machines really great stuff. Thank you very much for sharing Tom.

You bet, Harry to do, Sire. It's our fun and games.

Right on. All right, we're gonna go right to the questions. And the first question that we have is probably a technical support question in the field. If a light bulb burns out or failure one of the machines, what did they do to resolve it Do they fix it or get a new one.

There were of 10 spare light bulbs inside the cover of the machine you can see them

right

up in there at the top of the machine, and they could screw those in the problem was that it messed up the message and sometimes they had to resend the message and resending a coded message is very dangerous because it makes it easier to to decode the messages.

That makes sense. Yeah. Wow.

Interesting

to service the machines in the field, later models of the Enigma had a test socket right in the machine where the operator could test all the light balls at the start of a given day to assure that we're all working.

Interesting. So they were really thinking ahead. Very good. Okay, our next question is, um, in your movie you mentioned that the Enigma machine in the Polish mathematicians broke the code in around 1932, and the 1939, the Germans invaded Poland, or the poles aware that the Germans were coming because they had already broken the quarter just those three back mathematicians,

they definitely knew about the build up they knew about German plans to invade the problem was the Germans used a technique called blitzkrieg, and although the Poles were sort of ready for them. The Germans just came in with such a tremendously rapid attack that they were not able to deal with it.

That's amazing. Okay, um, the next question is about zeusie z u s e e computers and I guess, zeusie computers were around the time of the enigma. They have any play into the Enigma story. They have a very

important part in the history of the development of computing. And if I could just mention. There are a lot of books on the history of the development of computing this one is particularly good. The Universal history of computing, but almost every history book on that talks about the development of computers mentions the Zeus computer as one important cog in the developmental steps.

Wow fascinating new history never know. Okay.

While I'm at it, just one more thing there's a fabulous book on Colossus and the development of the Enigma breaking machine at Bletchley Park and it contains a tremendous amount of history as well written by jack Copeland and others.

Thank you for sharing. That's great. On the next question is probably for the method petitions. The person asked about 10 to the hundred 15th power of combinations for the plugboard seems like it's way too large. He thought that it might be smaller. Could this be larger than individual code wheels as a follow up.

Yes, they, the NSA publishes a book and you can get it free by just going to their website nsa.gov on the crypto logical mathematics of the enigma. And that book explains how it gets to 10 to the 114 power. It is not 10 to the 100 and 14th power. Easy settings you have to go in, you'd have to switch the reflector. That number really comes is the maximum number of settings if all of the factors are unknown. So from a practical practical purpose. The person who was asking that question is correct, that the code breakers have less than 10 to 114 power possibilities to deal with.

Right. Okay, that was a good question. The next question is, they would like to start a project or are their projects to decode Enigma code by modern computers.

Yes, there are many, many people doing that. One of the favorite things for people is to build simulators, and one of the favorite simulators is this wonderful little Arduino enigma. And it works just like an enigma using a simple Arduino, if you just Google Arduino and make money you can have a real Enigma machine, using an Arduino for incredibly low price I think it gets 150 bucks for it all program for you. And it accurately simulates and emulates every Enigma machine model that was ever designed. But aside from that there are a number of people working every time, and that's very exciting every time we discover a batch of undie coded messages. People said about different ways of using modern computers to decode those messages and again you can google and unsolved Enigma messages and see some of the projects that are underway. The first time it was done, it took a full year with 100 computers in parallel processing people, whether they did it, distributed processing where people use their home computers all linked together and they were able to break one Enigma message in a full year with 100 computers going now they've developed better algorithms.

Wow, that's, that's an incredible store.

What a bunch of processing power. Okay. The next question is, uh,

okay.

Uh, you mentioned something about the haggling was the haggling

stopping reduced because of a backdoor or was there another reason.

I don't see that question can you clarify it.

Alright, I guess it might be a misspelling I'm gonna go over to no I

can I can talk about that for a second, very important. The Hagel and machines were actually initially designed in 1935 but they were built in various forms all the way until 2018, and early on the CIA managed to arrange to have a backdoor in them. And these machines were used by 125 different countries, none of whom knew that every message they said with these machines was it capable of being read by the CIA so it's a little bit like Churchill, with his Trojan horse. So the haglund machines have an amazing history of

decoding

Trojan horses definitely the good word for it. So we have about three minutes left I think will be we get one or two more questions. So the next question was does Poland do any cool cryptography or privacy stuff nowadays that we might not be aware of or is not widely reported.

One of the things that the polls are very concerned with is that they be recognized for what they did. And little by little people are putting up statues and memorials to the mathematicians who did the code breaking, and were in touch with many of the polls and their major focus is raising awareness of what the Polish contributions were there is some current cryptology going on there. But I'm not aware of it I'm mainly focused on their attempt to find their proper place in the history of cryptography.

Yes, more power to them they deserve it.

Right. Next question is, if all the enigmas had been destroyed. How did that person have three of them. Was he in the military that he sneaked them home or just never found them or he bought them from other people do you know how he acquired them,

and they were not all destroyed, what happened was that the Germans found out that Churchill had ordered every gi to destroy them. and some Germans actually grabbed them and took them home thinking, well, maybe they'll someday be valuable, and most of those Germans have died, and what we do, actually, is to try and find the few surviving enigmas they're usually in the basement or an attic. The family thinks it's just an old typewriter. They sometimes even show up that garage sales and flea markets. That's how the few of them survived there, we keep the only list of surviving neg most in the world and there are a 287 known Nic most that survived out of the 30,008 most that were made during the war.

Well 30,000 that's a lot of moving parts. Okay, we're out of time. I want to thank you very much, Dan for and your son. Tom for our I'm sorry, Tom for our and your son den for our thank you very much for sharing this great story about the Enigma machine with all of us here at 2020 on behalf of the attendees, and the volunteers and the staff of hope 2021 thank you very much for sharing this with us.

and thank you hope for a great conference.

Thank you for having us. Thank you.