Top 5 Weaknesses of an Enigma | Bletchley Park

[@valipopa75]

Great video! Sound quality could be improved.

[@BletchleyParkTrust]

Hi, thanks for your feedback! We will take this on board and look into how we could improve the sound quality for next time! Kind regards, BP

[@Sool101]

​@@BletchleyParkTrustmaybe you forgot to turn on your lavel mic or the level was set way too high so it's constantly compressing. You can hear the difference in the first word after a silence. Make a short test video where you play with the level and see what happens. Just speak out the level setting after a silence it's an easy reference.

[@michaelclutton8446]

@@BletchleyParkTrust Excellent video, the lack of sound quality made it difficult to understand every word. My tinnitus certainly doesn't help

[@russellhltn1396]

@@BletchleyParkTrust It might be the room, but more likely the microphone you used. Too much echo. I'd check with successful KZbinr's and see what wireless mics they use. I don't think it's that expensive.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

​@@BletchleyParkTrust A professional lavaliere mic is probably the simplest solution.

[@WSA691]

good video but any future ones from that room should have sound curtains hung and a better mic closer to the speaker

[@russellnixon9981]

A very good presentation of a difficult subject very well explained , look forward to the next one.

[@randylplampin1326]

Suggestion: If possible redo the audio part bringing the microphone much closer, decrease the echo, and be careful about the inadvertent trailing off of the speech volume at the end of the sentences. Other than that keep up the good work!

[@kensmith5694]

Yes, even a bit of reprocessing the audio could help with that. A bit of AGC can reduce the trailing off effect. There is software than can largely remove echos. Removing an echo relies on basically adding an echo but with the phases of the echoed signal reversed. It tends to work best to take out one strong reflection.

[@randylplampin1326]

Thank you very much. At least you are considering the issue and the options.

[@danielv5825]

I had no idea Bletchley Park had a channel, and I'm now subscribed. I've heard this and don't know if it's true; there was a German guardpost in North Africa (I've heard it described as being in the canyon south of El Alemain) that the British deliberately left alone. The thinking supposedly was that no attack was possible through that area, so it was of limited military importance. However, every day the German soldiers would dutifully send the encrypted message "[Today's date] Nothing to report, HH" which the British would dutifully intercept and send to Bletchley Park to help with cribbing attacks. I must ask, does anyone know if this is true? As a former security guard, I know all too well the tedium of guarding something that nobody is interested in, and dutifully filling out the same paperwork day after day. It tickles me pink to imagine this paperwork helps undermine the war effort of an entire nation.

[@BletchleyParkTrust]

This is true! Satisfyingly it is mentioned in Gordon Welchman's book 'The Hut Six Story' and in contemporary documents. As you say the station was in the Qattara Depression, and the crib was 'Nacht verlauf ruehig' ('quiet night'). The station was eventually attacked and went off the air, forcing Hut 6 to find new cribs for that key (unfortunately I don't know which key it was). Best, Tom

[@Bjowolf2]

Did the Bletchley people ever try deciphering the previously undecipherable messages later on - for instance from the dark periods, when the Germans changed their setup and even introduced extra rotor wheels on some of their machines? Some of these messages could still have been of military importance later on, or they might have been of historical interest towards of after the end of the war.

[@bwhog]

Any cipher that is meant to be two way, by definition, has certain weaknesses that can be exploited. It is not surprising that Enigma also suffered. The bit about not being able to get out the same letter you put in is about removing a substantial amount of permutations from the possible cipher results. This is much the same thing that a lot of these stupid "minimum password requirements" do today. By eliminating permutations, they actually make a brute force attack easier, if you have access to the enciphered result. Another way of dealing with the notch on the rotor would have been to make it a clip or a post that could be moved to any position prior to the rotor being installed.

[@TheNinthGeneration1]

The simplest weakness is that you transmit the message to everyone.

[@davidevans6758]

My late Auntie Brenda who died in 2011 was stationed at Bletchly Park during the second world war. She was recruited as she was good at a Crossword or two. So, worked in one of the huts that women liked her filed the daily code sheets would be held. After the war, she found a job with a small local publishing company called Shire Publications. Proof reading and the like. I was told a story, that she was able to get messages from the Far East, before anyone else would. Don't know how true the family legend is, but its agood one still.

[@carlam6669]

Please redo the video without the echo. I’m interested in the content but unable to understand the words.

[@jamesomaha5330]

Fun fact. The Swiss army decided to use the enigma after the war. They copied the German enigma, and used it for decades. It was not made public that the British were able to read enigma during the war. So for many years the Swiss army had no secrets for the British. Years ago I visited an exhibition about spionage and code breaking. They had every enigma type made on display. The commercial, German army, navy, Airforce and a type used by the military HQ (5 made?) I believe the airforce late 44 decided to build a new advanced model. This type never into use. Also a post war Swiss enigma. Several Soviet American British and German spysets were on display. Origin of some of the displayed equipment they kept a bit vague about. One enigma was found on a fleemarket in an eastern country. An American set was found in a German building used by the Americans for storage, it had a tag with the remark it should be destroyed. It was the last known example. To restore it the owner got , years later, a copied manual from a former Russian officer!

[@patavinity1262]

I guess the Swiss were lucky that the chances of war against Britain in the middle of the twentieth century were slim.

[@m.a.6478]

This was not the only time the Swiss had an interesting situation around encryption. Just search for "Crypto AG" and "CIA"....

[@vksasdgaming9472]

Interesting note about Swiss. I wonder how long it took for NATO to figure out that Swiss were using Enigma-codes?

[@bsimpson6204]

@@vksasdgaming9472 10 mins I imagine

[@vksasdgaming9472]

@@bsimpson6204 Ciphered message is just mess of letters. How can that tell how it was encrypted?

[@gadgetgus]

I knew three of them. Thank you, Thomas and BP, for your in-depth video - much appreciated. Q. When the Soviets reverse engineered Enigma and Lorenz, then added their own layers of security, one wonders how many years were we breaking Soviet codes in the Cold War with the sons of Colossus, even though Kim Philby gave the game away?

[@WagnerGimenes]

Thank you. I love these presentations.

[@skyden24195]

Having previously watched the Jared Owen, "How did the Enigma Machine work?" video, which was utilized in part during this video, did help me to understand (better) what was being discussed here. As I am to understand, Mr. J. Owen did receive assistance for his video from the Bletchley Park staff. Great videos on both ends of the Enigma. 😉

[@yclept9]

Room echo adds liveness in stereo but obscurity in monaural.

[@MarsJenkar]

Thank goodness they added closed-captioning to this. I needed to turn it on to understand all of it.

[@dfs-comedy]

Fascinating video. Suggestion for future: Use a mic that's closer to your mouth to reduce the echo. The audio was not the best.

[@Chiberia]

the mic was on his shirt - I do a lot of audio room tuning, there's nothing about placement that would have reduced this. the only thing you can do is choose a better room or put up a lot of soft material to trap the reverb. it's a poor location choice.

[@BletchleyParkTrust]

Hi, thanks for your comment. We will definitely take this feedback on board for our next video. For now, we have updated the subtitles so they are all correct - so we hope this helps you to enjoy this video. Kind regards, BP

[@David-qe8cn]

I struggled to hear what was being said. I have moderate hearing loss but can hear other youtube videos without difficulty.

[@theoztreecrasher2647]

@@David-qe8cn Yep. Most even new-chum KZbinrs can seem to produce quite listenable audio for their videos that doesn't sound like they are speaking with their heads in a kerosene tin. I doubt that many of them have access to the services of specialist sound engineers or fancy gear. Just check sound quality with mic and room location BEFORE knocking yourself out recording a video. 😉

[@patrickvolk7031]

A question. If they changed the input wheel, wouldn't that just have been an equivalent to a stecker setting? It would've slowed thing down, but would have been factored out leaving the QWERTZU.

[@TheDavidlloydjones]

If you record in a room with hard walls, uncarpeted floors, wooden furniture, you'll get a horrid echo. Works every time. Just to be on the safe side, you could put a bunch of metal file cabinets behind you, to bounce sound into the mike. Go for it!

[@rockapartie]

Nope, doesn't work every time. The other video I just watched ("Top 5 Features of an Enigma | Bletchley Park"), recorded in the same room, doesn't have this horrible echo. My guess is there was something wrong with the lapel mic and they used the horrible sound from the camera instead.

[@modavies8401]

Oh, and the NATO equivalent of Enigma as used in the 1960‘s we engineers were forbidden to meter out and map rotor connections when fault finding on rotors, we had to lay the rotor on a conductive surface and Check each connection to this common connection only, without actually knowing where it came from. Pity so many Americans sold rotors, manuals, settings, and even complete machines to the Soviets over a period of years.

[@danielstickney2400]

Bletchley Park's ability to identify and exploit structural weaknesses in Enigma that the Germans either ignored or never identified implies that the Germans never tried breaking the Enigma cypher themselves to validate its effectiveness. Edit: Or the Germans did try and they just weren't motivated enough to work past their confirmation bias.

[@thomasw.eggers4303]

Given the HUGE effort Bletchley used, including lives lost, the Germans would not likely have wanted to spend that effort to test breaking their own cypher. I wonder how much effort the US used in testing its own cyphers with an independent group.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

It's because they fully swallowed their gumpf about being a genetic master race. It's what _they_ chose so it is therefore the correct choice. Others could not break it because they were inferior.

[@patavinity1262]

Militaries simply want to believe their encryptions are unbreakable. The Germans also cracked the British naval codes, but the Royal Navy insisted it couldn't be done, even despite evidence to the contrary. The Japanese naval codes were broken, but the Imperial Japanese Navy insisted it couldn't be done, despite evidence to the contrary.

[@JimWatt]

The Germans did look at security of their systems and their codebreakers were decrypting Swiss enigma traffic regularly. The introduction of the four wheel enigma used in 1942 suggests the Kriegsmarine considered the older machine vulnerable. The result was nearly a year of being unable to read messages.

[@censusgary]

As explained in the video, the Germans knew there were weaknesses in Enigma, but removing these weaknesses always introduced new problems.

[@57thorns]

Really interesting to get an overview of why the flaws were there. the human errors that they prevented and the complexity avoided. Looking forward to the explanations of how procedures would have been able to obfuscate some of the flaws. But in the end, I believe the Germans knew that the machine could be cracked, they just did not think that someone would spend the equivalent resource of the Manhattan Project or the 1960s Moon program on cracking it. But the Allies did have resources available that the Germans simply did not, and could afford to do two of those during the war.

[@jwillisbarrie]

Thanks for adding actual captions for the Deaf. makes it easier to follow

[@KENKENNIFF]

I recommend Simon Singhs book about Enigma, even I understood it, although I read somewhere that you could read everything about Bletchley Park and still not know what really went on.

[@Yunners]

1. No Wifi 2. No Blu Tooth 3. Can't install Apps 4. No USB support 5. Can't change the desktop theme Otherwise it's pretty good.

[@ThePsiclone]

To be fair to the British, you wouldn't expect someone to wire up the entry wheel in such an obvious way, given the purpose of the machine. You can only imagine some German saying "We could wire it in an insanely complex way, but they will expect this, we will use the simplest dumbest option possible. This they will not expect!" (obviously they'd have said it in German, or maybe not, because you'd be expecting that...)

[@martinlord5969]

Yes, it's very Spaceballs

[@greenhaloxbox3850]

And I'm from the Spanish inquisition. No one ever expects me.

[@TheNinthGeneration1]

It might be a consequence of building it on a large scale, and this made it faster to build

[@MarsJenkar]

@@TheNinthGeneration1 Given that the commercial version of the Enigma was (presumably) already built on a large scale, and _didn't_ use the same-letter relationship that the military version did, I don't really buy that argument without evidence. To me, the entry wheel being wired in such a simplistic way was probably the most easily preventable error in the machine's manufacture; everything else had what seemed to be a tradeoff between practicality and security.

[@michaelwoodhams7866]

How about instead of having just one notch per rotor, you had, say, eight in some irregular pattern. As I recall, Rejewski's analysis at some point made use of the fact that in a six letter sequence (repeated three letter indicator), most of the time only the first rotor moved. Some mathematical care would need to go into the locations of the notches to ensure that the cycle time of the machine was still 26^3. My instincts say this should be solvable, but I don't know this for sure. The Lorenz machine did have such a multiple-notches-per-wheel design. As I recall, the notch locations were fully variable, and was part of the machine state set up. A major weakness not mentioned here, perhaps the greatest weakness, was the use of repeating the three letter indicator for each message. This was essential to everything Rejewski and the Poles did. It was, however, a weakness in usage, not inherent to the machine itself, and was fixed quite early in the war.

[@alexbowman7582]

It’s possible that some senior Germans suspected that Enigma was cracked but rationalised that the war was lost already and an intervention would just prolong the war and lead to more deaths and suffering. Wilhelm Canaris who hated the Nazis perhaps.

[@johnfleet235]

Alex-Admiral Donitz was pretty sure the codes were broken. Problem was by 1943-44, the Germans did not have the time or resources to create a new coding system.

[@markgoodrich941]

Well done. Thank you.

[@kensmith5694]

There is another way to make the thing able to return the same letter without doubling the complexity. The heart of the machine swaps pairs of wires. If the keyboard vs lamps also swapped pairs of letters then instead of "X" never producing an "X", the "X" might never return a "C". This extra layer of swapping could be controlled by a few double pole double throw switches. In english "E" comes up a lot and "Q" is rare so a swap of those two would help to keep the functioning of the machine a secret. Another weakness is that the input message and the output message are exactly the same length. An electromechanical system could avoid this by having some rule that in certain rotor positions, an extra character is inserted as you encrypt and one is skipped on the decrypt. What extra letter to use would require some rules to ensure you don't give something away in the process but a few extra letters here and there can make it harder to guess words and phrases.

[@gregorykrajeski6255]

This is fantastic information. Some of these things I knew but this is more in depth than any other explanation I have seen on how Enigma was cracked.

[@davidrussell8689]

Very well explained ! Even I could understand 😂( well almost )

[@TheRaptorXX]

Fantastic! Didn't actually UNDERSTAND most of it but then I love listening to people who obviously know things that I don't!!

[@COLINJELY]

I liked the story of when the RN went over to a French Port and kidnapped a Lightbouy. Then just waited for the local garrison to send a message, The Lightbouy is missing

[@peterjohnston4088]

Fascinating.Could there also be a psychological reason for not encrypting a letter as itself, as the user might suspect that the equipment had developed a fault?

[@thomaswalder4808]

It was a technical reason because the Germans wanted to send the signal two times through the rotors - there was a reflector after the last rotor which sends the signal back in opposite direction through the rotors (called "Umkehrwalze"). But electric current could not flow back in the same wire

[@peterjohnston4088]

@@thomaswalder4808 Well, yes but my point is that the video also explains that it is possible with extra complexity and expense, but this may be an additional reason why this was not done.

[@cigmorfil4101]

​​​@@peterjohnston4088 When a key was pressed it disconnected to path to the bulb for that letter (which then went to battery -ve) and connected the battery +ve to the wire to the rotor-reflector pack. To enable the machine to allow self encryption would require that every wire within the machine had to be doubled: each rotor could have been wired like the drums of the bombe machines with 2×rings of 26 connectors on each side (an inner and outer ring) so that the path was through two different sets of wires within the rotors. The reflector would then have one of the outer ring contacts connected to the inner ring contacts - if any was connected to the same position, then self encryption could occur. At the other end 26 wires would go to the keyboard (say outer ring) and 26 would go to the bulbs (the inner ring). However, to permit steckering, the stecker board would require another 52 sets of connectors: the original 52 for the keyboard and a new 52 for the bulbs. The net result would be a much more complex machine with a greater chance of failure, and considering the number built, much greater cost. An improvement would have been the use of single stecker wires, but complete loops would need to be made: the stecker cables were cross wired with the top connector of one plug connected to the bottom conector of the other plug, thus A became B and B became A. However, but using single wires, A could become B, B->C and C->A (from keyboard/light board - the reverse (C->B, B->A, A->C would happen from rotors). The problem with this is that if the top of any letter is steckered to the bottom of any other, then its bottom also needs to be steckered to the top of another letter (and vice-versa); this is prone to human error - the double plug cross wired cables as used removes this (as plugging A-> automagically plugs B->A).

[@johnkelly7264]

WOW! How could I not subscribe. Subbed here for sure. Thanks!

[@chriswesley594]

Just to echo.... What others have said this is a great video but please do better with the audio in future videos.

[@BletchleyParkTrust]

Hi, thanks for your comment. We will definitely take this feedback on board for our next video. For now, we have updated the subtitles so they are all correct - so we hope this helps you to enjoy this video. Kind regards, BP

[@ArjayMartin]

Cool besides the sound sucks and is hard to understand with all of the echo.

[@imelbook]

What's the brand of your mic? I would like to know so we can avoid it.

[@pierremainstone-mitchell8290]

Nice one indeed! Thanks for the info!

[@foowashere]

Thank you ever so much for making and sharing, it was very interesting and well thought out. 👍

[@markthibault8579]

Good video. Looking forward to the next in the series.

[@walterkronkitesleftshoe6684]

The "Enigma" was relatively "encryption lite". The REAL heavyweights were the Lorenz SZ series (used by the German Army & Navy high Commands, and the Siemens and Halske T52 "Geheimeschreiber" (Used by both the Luftwaffe high command, and the top level of German govt) ALL of which were broken by the British during WW2.

[@carmadme]

The story behind how Lorenz was deciphered is facinating

[@anthonyjackson280]

@@carmadme Colossus.

[@allangibson8494]

And the fun the Americans had because the Russians used those machines and their duplicates for ten years after WW2 until the secret was blown by the Cambridge Five (along with the East German phone cable taps).

[@WilliamHarbert69]

Fascinating, thank you for this presentation.

Great introduction. You got the information, the enthusiasm AND the material. Please do deep dives on any nooks and crannies about the machines and procedures, like Ryan Szimanski does on @BattleshipNewJersey . No own animation (@JaredOwen is GOAT), fancy video editing or camera movements necessary but get someone to fix that audio. I am off to watch all your videos on Colossus. Thank you, sir.

[@BletchleyParkTrust]

Hi, thanks for your comment. We will definitely take this feedback on board for our next video. For now, we have updated the subtitles so they are all correct - so we hope this helps you to enjoy this video. Kind regards, BP

[@aamiddel8646]

Interesting. Thanks. Has there ever been an attempt to break Enigma messages using a modern computer just with brute force (so no cribs etc)? And what about AI and breaking Enigma coded messages (I guess it is to early to ask if quantum computers have given it a try..)

[@ronwade2206]

Uncle worked with one for Motorola. Refused to talk about the work but said they were obviously hand made.

[@rustycherkas8229]

First off, thank you for the information. Amazing minds on both sides of the front line... Question, please: "Clashing" and cribs... Plaintext was printed on paper. Each letter put through Enigma, its enciphered version recorded on paper (for transmission). Posit: Today's printed settings for rotors, rings, plugboard, etc. (“Schlüsseltafel”?) includes a number in range, say, 13 to 31... Printed plaintext letters are counted to this number and last one is circled, then repeat count & circle to end of plaintext message. (eg. every 17th letter is circled.) During enciphering, circled letters bypass Enigma, being copied "as is" to ciphertext sheet. Effect: some letters of ciphertext APPEAR as if they've been encrypted to themselves. Sender and recipient both "know" which letters were NOT put through the device. Simple to implement (only one extra column of numbers on "daily settings" pages.) Would this make "cribs" significantly less likely to work? Would this strengthen or weaken the encryption?

[@BletchleyParkTrust]

Hi, thanks for your question. This would be a valid technique which would have made things more complex for BP, but I believe it would have weakened the encryption. If BP knew the range of spacings at which unenciphered characters were likely to occur, then they could carry out an attack based on frequency analysis of each letter at a spacing of 13 letters, 14, 15, etc. This would have been fairly easy to automate using punched-card machinery. Since the same spacing would be used for all messages on that daily key, there would have been plenty of traffic to work with. When letters at a particular spacing were found to show the same letter frequencies as plain language, then the spacing would be evident, and BP would have plain-language fragments of all messages. Clearly this would then make a crib-based attack much easier. Best, Tom

[@rustycherkas8229]

@@BletchleyParkTrust In case no one has mentioned this before, you guys & gals have amazing brains. Here I thought I'd thought of a way around the "biggest flaw", and... well... that's what we lay-people imagine we might be capable of... Thank you for the clear, polite and delightful deflation of my ego... *sigh* Thank you for taking the time to consider this and for your nice reply. 🙂

[@sweinnc]

How can you allow such poor audio quality?

[@kit888]

Did the Germans pad the start and end of their messages with random words like the Americans did? How big a factor is this? Would encrypting messages twice using two Enigmas with different settings have helped, like triple DES?

[@cigmorfil4101]

Dunno about padding, but the Germans used radio nets which each had their own settings for the Enigma - the different nets could not decrypt traffic on another net. If a message was required to be transmitted across two radio nets, at the "gateway" Station which was part of two nets the message would be transmitted encrypted on the first net, received, decrypted, re-encrypted for the second net and sent on. Unless the message was rephrased this provided a mega crib for breaking a second net: if the message was broken on one net - the plaintext of the message received on the second net would be known! It did happen allowing multiple nets to be broken quickly once a multi-net message was found.

[@csjrogerson2377]

I know someone who owns one. I saw it every day at work.

[@Versatilty]

If the notch was on the wheel side not the number side then you would know the ring turns every 26 pushes and could back track that to the letter it produced. If I not mistaken this would be an even bigger flaw

[@jfbeam]

Only if you used one pin. Use 2 in random positions. (even that is detectable, just a lot harder.)

[@randycarter2001]

Something else about the engineering like wiring the input wheel is it had to be reproducible. They would be making hundreds of these machines. They all had to be identical.

[@kingpetra6886]

The Polish never got enough credit in this area.

[@TheNinthGeneration1]

The holes on the front are how you modify the keyboard to the entry motor. The physical hardware also had to be identical to undo the messages, and it can’t be edited, it had to be identical. If you’re making a permanent version on a mass scale, why not use the easiest pattern to build?

[@dondouglass6415]

Fantastic video... Sfaazs!! 😊

[@Yaivenov]

What if the rotor notches were made adjustable? Notch positions could be part of the code of the day.

[@bwhog]

I really wish I could buy a replica of an Enigma machine! They're really neat devices!

[@donhenry7879]

The French were also given the Enigma machines after the Second WW. Charles de Gaulle was told that the codes could not be broken. Long story but the British ( Churchill) Did not trust de Gaulle. When the French found out that the British and Americans and by extension the Canadians were reading all the French military and diplomatic traffic , he was some upset. He came to Qubec Canada in 1967 and gave his Famous speech, Vive le Qubec Libre. It was mystery at the time why he was so upset.

[@scottparis6355]

Interesting. Some of the weaknesses of the Enigma machine were due to the extra expense and complication of adding a feature, such as the inability to encode a letter as itself. It would seem, then, that a nearly unbreakable code machine could be made with even a low powered personal computer, where coding a letter as itself would cost nothing and add nothing to the complexity of the machine. Just a single line of code. Modern encoding machines must be a nightmare to break. They can have an infinite number of layers of encoding with no additional cost, even on a very simple computer.

[@umi3017]

But if it use a P function then brake it with that simple computer would be as easy as encoding it. But modern encryption is based on NP function.

[@chengong388]

Modern cyphers don’t even generate the same length of message as the original. And yes the messages aren’t breakable within the life time of the universe.

[@thomaswalder4808]

@@chengong388 There are two types of modern cyphers. Stream ciphers and block ciphers. For Stream ciphers the encrypted message is as long as the clear text. For block ciphers the encrypted message may be larger by the used block size -1

[@jfbeam]

@@chengong388 Can't be brute forced _with current technology_ within the lifetime of the universe. We said the same thing about DES when it was new. Everything has changed in the decades since. (eg. my first computer in 1985 was less than 1MHz, and 8bit! The less than $100 piece of trash I'm using right now has a 2.4GHz 4-core 64bit processor.)

[@allangibson8494]

Multiple layers of encryption do have a cost - time. The deeper the encryption the slower it is to implement. Thats why current Windows 11 machines (with encryption active by default) are significantly slower running software than Windows 7 machines running the same software. You are also FAR more likely to permanently and unrecoverably lose your work due to a corrupt cypher key.

[@hobbitreet]

Nerds at War!!! I loved this!!!

[@MrLaughinggrass]

Very interesting, how many permutations of the initial wiring could there have been? I am intrigued that the British didn't try the A-A, B-B one. Is it 26x26x26? I ask just because it is probably one of the easier challenges amongst very difficult ones. I can just imagine someone asking them in a meeting whether they had tried every permutation and them saying they had, even though they hadn't tried the one that few would think to try.

[@thomaswalder4808]

There are 26! = 26 * 25 * 24 * 23 * .... * 2 * 1 = 403291461126605635584000000 different possibilities for the wiring inside of a single rotor.

[@MrLaughinggrass]

@@thomaswalder4808 thank you

[@modavies8401]

In the 1960‘s we assumed that NATO online messaging was broken within 48 hours. There is no unbreakable cypher machine according to our experts. Incidentally an ENIGMA simulator used to be available on the Internet, and may still be extant today.

[@thomaswalder4808]

"There is no unbreakable cypher machine according to our experts." I don't know who your experts are - but they are wrong. There is is very simple encryption method called "One time pad" which is unbreakable and this could be even proven mathematically. Even a brute force attack (trying all possible keys) would not help

[@misarthim6538]

@@thomaswalder4808 More specifically, one time pad with cypher key as long or longer then the message. And yes, you are correct, that's literally unbreakable. But also, for practical reasons, also almost unusable for any practical military communication. It was used in spycraft though.

[@astebbin]

@@misarthim6538Maybe unusable in the 1980s, certainly not today with terabyte flash drives

[@thomaswalder4808]

@@misarthim6538 Today where it is easy to store a 1 Terabyte key on a microSD that should be enough for encrypting text messages for a long war

[@vksasdgaming9472]

Nothing is unbreakable. Question is only about how long it takes to break the code. If code changes every day and it takes a week of work to break it is practically unbreakable code.

[@lawrencetaylor4101]

I wish I could remember the breakfast cereal that offered a decoder ring if you sent in 10 boxtops. Maybe they should have changed the number of boxes kids would have to eat to receive their decoder.

[@gcewing]

Ovaltine did that, I think.

[@christiangeiselmann]

It is an enigma to me why you did not use a better audio setup.

[@jonadabtheunsightly]

I had a way to mitigate the inability to encipher a letter as itself, with only a little extra wiring (by changing how the plugboard works); I wrote it up in detail, and then I realized its fatal flaw: it didn't leave the self-deciphering property intact. Which would theoretically be even better for cipher security... except that it also means you need distinct setups for encoding and decoding, which is a problematic level of complexity when ordinary military officers are going to be operating the thing. So yeah, that's probably why they didn't do it that way. So yeah, I guess we either have to invent modern computers and private/public key-pair cryptography, or base our codes on a natural language for which our side has a total monopoly on native speakers. Or train our people to the point where they don't do stuff like use predictable wording on a predictable schedule.

[@andrewgwilliam4831]

Thanks for that, and nice to see Jared Owen's video getting "official" recognition. I don't know anything about cryptography but an idea occurred to me while watching the video. Would it have been practical for the Germans to insert random letters into the text to be encrypted? For example, today's messages might have an arbitrary letter added at the 3rd, 9th, 16th, and 17th positions. Wouldn't that have made decryption harder, because a string of characters wouldn't then match a German word?

[@stuartlomas8557]

I seem to remember reading that is exactly what they did with the Lorenz cipher machine. This was used to send messages to the high command in Berlin, they were eventually decrypted with the invention of the Colossus computer at Bletcley.

[@BletchleyParkTrust]

This would certainly have made things harder, but as usual the problem would be ensuring this procedure was followed consistently enough on the German side, but not so consistently BP worked out what was going on! It would make the operators’ task even more complicated to keep track of added characters in a message that could be 250 characters long. Inevitably some would cut corners - for example making all their arbitrarily chosen letters ‘A’! In reality operators were encouraged to pad out messages with random filler, but BP dealt with this. I suspect they would have found ways to deal with the method you describe as well. Best, Tom

[@andrewgwilliam4831]

@BletchleyParkTrust Thank you for the considered response! 😀 I suppose it's even possible that standardised "random" characters might've *helped* code breakers, as it would allow for an unrelated attack vector, once it was inevitably (?) realised what might be happening.

[@TheMightyKinkle]

How do the wires in the rotors not get tangled up if they are rotating?

[@derwoodbowen5954]

The wires are internal to each rotor. They run from the contact point on each side of the rotor. The inside of a rotor has been described as a rats nest, however the whole wiring harness rotates with the wheel.

[@gcewing]

Seems to me the non-self-encipherment property could have been eliminated without making the machine more complicated, just by eliminating the reflector and only passing the signal through the rotors in one direction. But would that have had other undesirable effects on the security?

[@thomaswalder4808]

Correct - the idea of the "reflector" and sending back the stream through the rotors was a very bad idea and even made the enigma more complicated to build Another design flaw was, that each rotor only had one notch for turning the next rotor one step further. This has the impact that the second rotor is moving only every 26th character and the third rotor only every 676th character. I think 99,9% of all messages were shorter than 676 characters so the third rotor never was moved. The later added fourth rotor would be only turned in a message longer than 17576 character. If somebody was able to send 3 characters per second using the morse code it would have taken 90 minutes to send such a long message. So from a cracking perspective the third and fourth rotor together with the sticker board could be treated as a "static" character substition which is is relativly easy to crack By adding more than one notch to each rotor it would be much harder

[@GordonWrigley]

With stuff like the plugboard, you say it was a weaker than a more complex plugboard, but how much did it add over no plugboard? Likewise with the reflector, it was weaker than the more complex setup of dual paths through the rotors, but how much did it add over only going through the rotors once? Overall were any of these things so bad that it would have been more secure if they had left the feature out entirely?

[@thomaswalder4808]

"but how much did it add over only going through the rotors once?" It added nothing - the number of possible settings of enigma did not increase by the reflector - it even weaken the encryption.

[@johneberhard8412]

Very interesting

[@frederickbowdler8169]

Surely the inability of the to not encipher a letter as it's self comes from the plug board as when the plug is pushed in it disconnects the circuit to the lamp of the key that is pressed .

[@frederickbowdler8169]

Great video.what I meant to say was when a key is pressed an inhibition of that lamp is initiated by a switch surely the reflection cannot r ule out later substitution.

[@jmbauer68]

Voice over was excellent

[@billyyank2198]

Keeping their cipher secure proved to be an enigma for the Germans.

[@allanwrobel6607]

I have always wondered how more secure Enigma would have been if operators had been given 20 sided die with letters on them , making it so much easier to randomise the initial key setting for the message?

[@allanwrobel6607]

Bye the way, thanks, a very informative presentation easily digestible.

[@K7AGE]

Great video production. Poor audio quality. I don't think the microphone that he was wearing was working. Could you do a test recording and check the file on your laptop?

[@frederickbowdler8169]

My understanding is that when a key is pressed a switch disconnected the lamp with the same letter am i incorrect?

[@Jon77Levy]

Isn't changing the connections on the plugboard mathematically equivalent to having a different entry wheel? Setting that aside, I'd like to ask another question - is there a database of enigma messages surviving from the war, together with (hopefully) the various settings which lets you decipher them? I've only found a few online, salvaged from submarines, things like that.

[@patrickvolk7031]

No. The steckers just cause substitutions, without changing the wheel substitution. The bombes ran cribs which would check all wheel combinations and stop when there were no stecker conflicts, like if two mapped to the same letter, or 'self-stecker'. The Kriegsmarine Enigma didn't have a steckerbrett. There were like 14,700 or so starting positions without the steckers.

[@Jon77Levy]

@@patrickvolk7031 But having a new, fixed, unchanging entry wheel also just causes substitutions, without changing the wheel substitution. The plugboard adds 10 permutations, by substituting pairs of letters. The combination of these 10 pair-substitutions can be described as a single permutation, mapping the set {A,B,C...Z) onto itself. But having a fixed, non-rotating, but non-trivial entry wheel, as suggested in the first 5 minutes, just adds a constant permutation, mapping the set {A,B,C...Z} onto itself. In other words, each setting in the plugboard is mathematically equivalent to choosing a different, non-rotating, non-trivial entry wheel.

[@mikepxg6406]

Superb. SOE at all times.....

[@janboen3630]

You need a sound engineer. This sounds like it's recorded in a hollow tube.

[@rudyyarbrough5122]

It has also been suggested that if the Germans had used more than the 26 letters in the alphabet and then randomly placed them on the wheels it would have made breaking the Enigma much more difficult. But as you said, the Germans are very practical.

[@johnchristopherrobert1839]

One of the biggest reasons why the enigma machine security system failed was because the operators got complacent and lazy. They didn’t follow the operating procedures. Wheels weren’t changed. They were using the same pages out of their code books multiple times and so on. In contrast the Russians used a much simpler encryption system which used code books. They used this system from the 1930s to somewhere in the late 1960s and codes were never broken. Why, because their operators and agents strictly followed the security protocols established for the system. In conclusion if the Germans would have followed their security protocols in all likelihood the enigma machine encryption system would never been broken even with the British’s fancy computers.

[@vksasdgaming9472]

For some reason Finnish radio intelligence lead by colonel Reino Hallamaa was very adept at reading Soviet messages so their codes were everything but secure. Following proper protocols doesn't help when someone is listening and knows how to decipher those messages.

[@johnchristopherrobert1839]

@@vksasdgaming9472 to bad they didn’t let the Americans in on that nugget of information because the Americans couldn’t break the Russians codes through the Cold War

[@vksasdgaming9472]

@@johnchristopherrobert1839 Must be result of lots of material being destroyed as precaution in post-war uncertain military situation. Soviets also employed one-time pads which are literally unbreakable. It was also Cold War which made such deals hard. Americans might have also been upset of their own diplomatic codes being broken.

[@greenhaloxbox3850]

The worst security flaw is as you said, the human factor. Had a less predictable style of daily broadcast been used like robin Williams good morning Vietnam ( and yes i know the Germans were too uptight for that level of nonsense) it would have been far harder to break enigma.

[@jfbeam]

Well, they did start every day with a weather report that literally started with "weather report"... they did the same damned thing with far less humor.

[@QueenVictoria-h4n]

Хороший ролик.!!!

[@davidcritchley3509]

The Germans also used a complex teletype coding machine which they don't often mention

[@davidcritchley3509]

Which worked in a completely different way and was far harder to break. Read "Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret" by Paul Gannon (2006) - the real father of the modern computer.

[@RobertClolery]

So many people worked at breaking that machine and others.

[@Orxenhorf]

I don't really think the entry wiring matters at all. If you can solve a wheel at all, the wiring inside would still do the same thing but just be shifted around to different relative positions than the legit one. Say the legit wheel connected A to B on pins 11 and 12, but your wheel put A in position 5 and B in position 17, the act of solving would just move the wire from 11-12 to 5-17.

[@thomasbjarnelof2143]

What if the plug-board was between the rotots and the lamps, od the keyboard and the rotors. Then you could encrypt a letter to it self.

[@cigmorfil4101]

Not due to the wiring of the machine. Each wire from the entry wheel went to the stecker board and then to the keyboard/lamp board. The lamps were connected to the battery -ve, and a change over switch, the keyboard switch, connected the entry wheel (via stecker board) to either the bulb (key unpressed) or the battery +ve (key pressed). The bulb for the pressed letter was physically disconnected from the battery->stecker->rotors->stecker->bulb path - it was physically impossible for the pressed key bulb to light up.

[@Mike44460]

This is really informative, but the sound is horrible. Make the time investment to test a different location and microphone setup to get it spot on and then remake this video. Your information will be appreciated by many. Thank you.

[@BletchleyParkTrust]

Hi, thanks for your comment. We will definitely take this feedback on board for our next video. For now, we have updated the subtitles so they are all correct - so we hope this helps you to enjoy this video. Kind regards, BP

[@notyou6950]

Cool

[@MrEsMysteriesMagicks]

Flaw #6 in the Enigma Machine was that it didn't use Native American Code Talkers.

[@chengong388]

There are millions of videos on the Enigma and how it got cracked, what about the cyphers used by other countries and the allies?

[@bradyelich2745]

Rockex, or Telekrypton, was an offline one-time tape Vernam cipher machine known to have been used by Britain and Canada from 1943. It was developed by Canadian electrical engineer Benjamin deForest Bayly, working during the war for British Security Coordination, headed up by Sir William Stephenson (Intrepid). Camp X in Canada had a communications tower that could send and transmit radio and telegraph communications, called Hydra. This radio was able to, and did, locate a u-boat in the Med from Oshawa, Ontario, and sent destroyers.

[@canvaskayaker3002]

I thought they could adjust the position of the notch on a rotor?

[@thomaswalder4808]

correct

[@jeffarmstrong1308]

While watching this video I began to wonder what would happen if a lamp failed. It would have been simple step to replace the failed lamp but the letter coded for would be irretrievably lost and the rest of the message would become garbled. I presume there would have been protocols too deal with this situation but what were they?

[@thomasw.eggers4303]

Each key stroke lights some lamp. A failed lamp would be easily identified as soon as some key didn't light it. No messages would be lost: the machine could be reset to the starting position and the message processed over again.

[@jeffarmstrong1308]

@@thomasw.eggers4303 Of course! I forgot that the message is only being *encoded* at this stage. It not being sent 'live'.

[@BletchleyParkTrust]

Thanks for your question! If no lamp lit it would have been immediately obvious that a lamp had failed. The operator could make a note of the rotor setting, then test all the lamps. The usual way to do this was to hold down one key, for example Q (this stops the rotors moving) and then press all the other keys in turn. Each key should light one and only one lamp, so you can work out which lamp isn’t lighting. See our previous video on Features of the Enigma to learn about how bulbs could be tested! Once the bulb was replaced, the operator could move the rotors back to the right position and resume encrypting/decrypting the message. If the fault was in the fitting rather than the lamp itself, the machine might have to go away for repair, and the operator would have to use the backup double Playfair hand cipher in the meantime - possibly giving BP a chance to discover a good crib! Best, Tom

[@jeffarmstrong1308]

​@@BletchleyParkTrust Thanks for the detailed response. We visited Bletchely Park on a whim on our way back to the airport from York to catch our flight to Australia and never regretted it. This is the first of you videos I seen but it won't be the last. Subscribed.

[@kensmith5694]

They ran the bulbs at a lot less than full voltage. They tended not to burn out.

[@LaxerFL]

Echo... echo...echo... Did you guys not hear how horrible his voice sounded when you were editing this video? Need to hang some blankets on the walls behind the camera or something, it sounds like he talking inside an empty tim can...

[@RogerSliney]

With todays technology how long would it take to decipher an enigma message using a common laptop with a suitable deciphering software?

[@gagatube]

About as long as it would take you to define what you mean by "suitable deciphering software"... 🤔

[@RogerSliney]

@@gagatube I guess as long as a piece of string!

[@jfbeam]

Depends on what you consider a "common laptop". Do we know the rotor wiring? Are we using the laptop CPU or GPU? Knowing what they knew in WWII, even a decade old budget GPU could break enigma in seconds. A general purpose CPU would take a bit longer. (think about the stupid amounts of processing being wasted for f'ing bitcoin bull.) The hardest part is knowing when you've decoded the message.

[@gagatube]

@@RogerSliney I was being serious. You asked how long it would take to "decipher an enigma message" - if your "suitable software" already knows the substitution alphabets in use from the rotor settings and plug-board settings then it's all very simple, just a matter of replacing one letter with another - so about 3/1000 of a second on a garden variety laptop. But if you are asking how long would it take to break the Enigma cypher for the day (i.e. work out the rotor settings etc from one message) that would depend entirely on how cleverly and well written the software was. Someone has probably already done this for real but my completely 'pulled out of the air' guesstimate would be between 5 and 10 minutes.

[@RogerSliney]

@@gagatube Thank you.

[@nofeerz]

I would love to understand this enigma was pushed as invincible perhaps redo w a microphone

[@larrybremer4930]

German postwar analysis: The words "Weather" and "Hitler" lost us the war!

[@JLWestaz]

Can't watch because of the terrible sound quality. Do something about it an re-release.

[@walterkronkitesleftshoe6684]

I think you missed out "please".

[@BletchleyParkTrust]

Hi, thanks for your comment. We will definitely take this feedback on board for our next video. For now, we have updated the subtitles so they are all correct - so we hope this helps you to enjoy this video. Kind regards, BP

[@thomthumbe]

The one and only totally, 100% secure system is one that has no access at all. So, since that doesn’t do anyone any good, the next decision is: What can we build that has good enough or reasonable security, uses current technology, but is within reason to train personnel for optimum operation.

[@thomaswalder4808]

If used correct "one time pad" encryption is 100% secure.

[@abrahamedelstein4806]

8:09 Wouldn't a more elegant solution have been to add an extra letter to the system that stood for repeating the entered letter?

[@thomaswalder4808]

The problem was not repeated characters but that enigma could never encrypt a character to itself. So if in the encrypted message at some position was an "E" you could be 100% sure that the clear text at that position could not be an "E". Knowing this the britains could guess a longer word which might be in the message and then find the positions in the decrypted text there this word might be. Without such a correct guess the "bombs" could not find out if they found a correct key. But luckily for the britains all messages of one day used the same key and some of this messages could be relativly easy guessed - like the weather reports. If you know the weather you could guess how the clear text of such a weather report was as it was send always in the same format.

[@abrahamedelstein4806]

@@thomaswalder4808 I'll try to rephrase, couldn't you have achieved the same effect by having an extra letter that stood for "repeat cleartext letter" so you send E as E and L as L enough times to throw off the codebreakers?

[@thomaswalder4808]

@@abrahamedelstein4806 Repeated letter were NOT the problem of enigma, The problem was that a letter could never encrypted to itself. So if you saw an "A" in the cipher text you could be 100% sure that the source text at that position was NOT an "A".

[@abrahamedelstein4806]

@@thomaswalder4808 Alright, so give me some rope here because I have fundamentally misunderstood the problem, because in my layman's head I would think that if you have an extra letter in the system that tells the operator to simply transmit the inputted letter as written in cleartext that it would solve this problem. As a hypothetical example, I write down BLUE on the machine and B comes out X, L as C and then the machine tells me to write U and then it goes back to conventional encryption as E comes as D. I my head, while admittedly probably opening up other avenues of decryption, should solve the problem as described since you can no longer be certain that some of the letters have gone back on themselves.

[@thomaswalder4808]

@@abrahamedelstein4806 How should the receiver know if that "U" in the encrypted message is clear text and must not be decrypted? The receiver need to know the positions of this "clear text letters" in the encrypted message - but how?

[@SkipFlem]

first thing I would do is replace the light bulbs with LEDs.

[@bob456fk6]

I remember the old days when we actually used incandescent lights on computers (even after WW2). The RED LED was a major, major breakthrough. 🙂

[@marklynch8781]

Perhaps not. I work on a German made machine and the LED bulbs are call "lumenous elements" in the parts book. They are of such poor design I commented "They don't rate being called light bulbs".

[@MaxXMcGill]

Top 5 weaknesses of the enigma machine: 1. A hammer 2. A can of coke (spilled) 3. A grenade 4. Gravity 5. People trying to be funny