Enigma Machine Demonstration

[@ArduinoEnigma]

Funny seeing an enigma machine being powered by 2 modern AA batteries...

[@JustJohn505]

These 2 bots are everywhere

[@j4ckcadd782]

Lol

[@JohnSmith-eo5sp]

I can't sense the scale - - I thought they were two C cells batteries - - makes more sense

[@MikkoRantalainen]

Enigma was mostly mechanical device - the only thing that needs electricity in Enigma is the light bulb. And just like flashlights do work with batteries, so could Enigma. In addition, using batteries as power source for these museo machines is a safety measure in case something causes a short circuit in that old device, nothing gets damaged easily.

[@edwardripley-duggan5055]

They were AA batteries in an off-the shelf battery compartment. The machine was designed for a low voltage lead acid battery. Someone made (or may still make) a battery enclosure that resembles that official issue battery. I had a great deal of fun learning to use the machine, which is beautifully made, as witness the fact that it still worked.

[@asd36f]

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has an Enigma machine, and 20 odd years I was able to visit the storage area and have a closer look at it - as a WW2 buff, it was a great thrill!

[@johnnoyobbo8618]

Never new it was in the Powerhouse Museum, the more you know.

[@malicant123]

Apparently, if you try to encode a letter, you will get any one of the other 25 letters of the alphabet, but never the letter itself. Numberphile has a great video explaining this, though I must admit that a lot of it is beyond me.

[@ankuryogi3298]

Great thanks

[@ciderfan823]

That was one of the keys to the British codebreakers being able to break the code, particularly if they had a guess. For instance, the signing off for a message might be the same, so if a letter matched, the settings could be known to be wrong.

[@thehelldoicallthis9241]

A channel called Jared Owen has a fantastic animation explaining how the electrical circuit and mechanism works to scramble each letter

[@dibbyo456]

@@thehelldoicallthis9241 yup just saw that. But he didn’t demonstrate the decryption.

[@thehelldoicallthis9241]

@@dibbyo456 he did. You just type in the message with the enigma in the same configuration as the sender and the lampboard spells out the decrypted message.

[@AmphiStuG]

Still amazes me that the Germans designed a marvel of mathematical, mechanical, and computing engineering and they just put it in a small wooden box.

[@ayanjit9196]

And how Turing understood the code

[@ayanjit9196]

@Uncle Bremner I know it was a an incredible invention and I was just telling that Turing was a genius too.

[@emileduvernois6680]

Every electric or electronic device was put in wooden casings at that time. Have you never seen an old radio receiver ?

[@d00der41]

How so? They invented close to half of the modern world and continue to make great achievements.

[@Legioniznogoud]

Germans to date is the power hub of engineering

[@denvan3143]

Thank you for the video. I suppose I could have guessed the 26 contacts were brass but I did not know the thumb wheel was Bakelite. Interesting details.

[@samspencer582]

The Enigma coding machine is my holy grail. I want to own one of these amazing machines, but I can´t afford to buy one.

[@ilyashl]

Worth noting that Enigma was initially invented for non-military purposes (securing commercial communications) long before the Nazis came to power.

[@ShannonCarpenter-dr1tt]

Go deeper. Source

[@SKyrim190]

Did it have one functionality for checking if all light bulbs were working? Because I imagine it would be very troublesome if you pressed one letter and no light turns on...them you know some light bulb is burnt, but you don't know which. And the way the machine works it is not like you can press every button to check which one is the broken bulb...

[@DixxyV]

You can press every button to check bulbs. As long as the initial positions of the three rotors are set back to the right one when you finish checking, it's fine.

[@zeniktorres4320]

I wouldn't be surprised there was some test lamp function on it. All the old equipment I used to work all had a test lamp switch.

[@andreylyutikov8348]

From the video I understood that to encrypt and decrypt a message you have to set the rotors into a certain position first, then, as encryption goes, the rotors are spinning, and their position at the end is completely different. To decrypt the message you have to set the rotors to the initial position. Am I right?

[@leemoore5212]

Yes. One of the cleverer bits of the German Enigma procedure was that the sender chose a new start position for each message, and sent it to the recipient encrypted. So if there were a hundred different users of any particular key, each sending five messages a day, there would be 500 diffeent start positions used, not just one pre-printed for that day on the key sheet. Makes life a LOT trickier for the enemy to decrypt. (Note the guy in the video gets this wrong at 1:45 when he says that you set the three letters at the top to "the key for the day." The three letters (strictly numbers in the military version) at the top are how you set the message key - the start position - which as I say is different for each message. ) The Germans started off (prior to 1940) with a major error, as their procedure required the sender to send the message start position TWICE. So suppose the chosen start position was WXY, the operator would tap in WXYWXY and get out say DEJMAP and send that. But from that the enemy knows that D in the frst position and M in the fourth position must be the same letter, likewise E in the second position and A in the fifth position etc. That doesn't solve the whole puzzle but it enabled Bletchley Park, looking at lots of messages on the same key, to rule out vast numbers of settings as impossible, making solution a lot easier. The Germans wised up and stopped this sending it twice procedure, but in the meantime BP had read plenty of messages so they had a good idea of the sorts of things the Germans were likely to be saying, which helped them later with devising "cribs" - ie guesses of the plain text.

[@rk3000100]

Fortunately for the world, there were Polish mathematicians who broke the cod enigma, here are their names Rejewski Zygalski and Różycki thanks to them

[@CZghost]

Yeah. Often Alan Turing is given the credit for the code breaking, but don't forget there was an entire team of mathematicians working on this, from all over the world.

[@---yr9of]

according to the info about the machine the code is not breakable because the letters are scrambled even within the same message.

[@JustSujC]

@@CZghost It's a shame that The Impostor Game didn't give credit to them.

[@derekwordley1837]

@@CZghost Tommy Flowers and many others

[@flyingmach7ne]

alan turing is give the credit because he built the Bombe Machine which is arguably the first mechanical computer ever

[@jasonlinton9902]

Why would it go for $80k to $129k were most of them destroyed after the war?

[@richardque1036]

This machine was definitely a well design and complex,no wonder the germwn were very confidence it will never be broken.

[@justinbouchard]

Beautiful machine in every aspect.

[@КајмакамЕфенди]

Do anyone know how the "umlaut" letters ä, ö, ü and the numbers 1, 2, 3...9 were written in the messages by Enigma?

[@derekwordley1837]

With todays technology, how long would it take to decipher an enigma message?

[@geddoog3424]

Well in no time

[@gabrielpereyra2094]

@@geddoog3424 how would you do it?

[@cigmorfil4101]

​@@geddoog3424 Great. Could you decipher this for me: DBICE ENVSY FKJNZ WPFWU LW I've had it for years: it's definitely an enigma encyphered message and the machine on which it was encyphered seems to be no longer publically available for use to decypher it.

[@Wildlifewatcher69]

@@gabrielpereyra2094 ai could solve it instantly

[@the_meccaneer]

But then do you just read the letters on the radio? How do you transmit?

[@JulsGeekPI]

it is an amazing machine thing, after more than 80 years i have programmed a online emulator on codepen.

[@sidyajv]

Seems like qwerty keyboard was already in use by that time.

[@cigmorfil4101]

That looks more like a qwertZ keyboard to me...

[@Jeffrey314159]

1:30 Cryptographic Complexity doesn't equal Cryptographic Security - - that's the big mistake the Germans made/assumed with these rotor based machines

[@MikkoRantalainen]

You have to remember that enigma was basically a mechanical calculator that only used electricity as the implementation. Technically it could have used even more mechanical parts instead of any electrical parts but it was easier to manufacture that way. The only thing that electricity actually did was to light a bulb using the wiring that consisted of only parts connected by mechanical movement. The electrical parts had zero logic. With a purely mechanical design, it's hard to come up with anything better even today. Of course, we nowadays know much better encryption algorithms using a shared secret key. The de facto industry standard is AES-256. And had the German switched the front panel wiring in addition to code wheel settings on daily basis, there's no way the messages had been decrypted so fast. So the problem was that out of possible settings they switched only a very minor part daily. It's like using modern encryption system but switching 7 bits of a 128 bit key instead of randomizing a totally new key when keys are rotated and pretending that you're using the encryption to max effect. That part was just pure laziness by Germans.

[@siriusleto3758]

@@MikkoRantalainen Scientists understand a lot about math, but they know very little about people. If the switch were automatic and not dependent on lazy operators, it would be much harder to break the encryption.

[@rustycherkas8229]

@@MikkoRantalainen What the heck are you talking about? While I make no claim to being an authority, each day's "device configuation" included 10 pairs of "swapped" letters effected by the plugboard; a different set of 10 pairs for each and every day... No device could participate in the conversation until its operator configured his device to match all the others... Pre-war commercial Enigma machines only had rotors. Military use added the plugboard complexity. Do you think they added it just for fun? "Lazy" includes "lazy thinking" by those who simply don't know but feel free to judge others...

[@MikkoRantalainen]

@@rustycherkas8229 The plugboard was just a simple substitution cipher (static for a day/month depending on the year, always statically substituing one letter with another) so it wasn't that hard to solve. In addition, because of the design of the machine, the plugboard substitution cipher was symmetrical so, for example, if A were subsituted with N, then N would also be substituted with A. Sure, plugboard required one additional step for the decryption but it wasn't the hard part. That said, the Enigma would have been safe it it had been used the most effective way ( maximum number of wheels for any given machine, fully random wheel setup, fully random plugboard setup and *fully random starting position* ). The last one was a major problem because it's logically the same as IV in modern encryption methods and German typically used "AAA", "BBB", "CCC" instead of random value. The Enigma machine would have been able to have encryption key strength near 2^50 but the use of (practically) constant IV undermined that a lot. I would guess German researchers didn't understand the importance of random IV or they would have fixed this simply by giving an order to use different method for the starting position.

[@MikkoRantalainen]

Also note that to be safe the starting position should have been about 10 letter long random sequence instead of user selected (that is, definitely not random) three letter sequence. Otherwise it would have always been the weak link in the practical use of Enigma machine encryption. Had Germany actually used a safe starting position, none of the methods that were used by the allied forces would have worked. The importance of random starting position (or IV or Initialization Vector in modern usage) seems to be poorly understood by many people even today. For example, the WEP encryption once used in WiFi/WLAN was broken because of it's weak IVs.

[@fillflashdetailer8838]

Pure and absolute genius

[@elWieslaw]

If it weren't for Polish mathematicians, for a hundred years brits would not know how to get down to this German toy ...

[@LazyAndFabulous]

At first, I used to think that the machine is gonna be hard and complex, but when I tried it, It strikes me, because I was surprised at how easy it was to use an Enigma machine...

[@JustSujC]

Of course, it's designed for operators to quickly decode and encrypt messages. The engineering underneath is what is baffling.

[@ЯнаАлександровна-й4у]

Thank you. Very interesting.

[@monoman4083]

how did it learn to speak german ???

[@cigmorfil4101]

By having a German operator type at it.

[@sergiocobas7705]

El coronel Chema Otero de la 5a división española trabajó para el ejercito de comunicaciones con esto

[@Rich18013]

Thank you for this. Great demonstration

[@Zurenio]

What about the uk machines enigma version ....?

[@DoyleNewYork]

Unfortunately, we have not had one of the UK machines come up for auction with us just yet.

[@robsilli6555]

Why did they just have 26 keys for letters, why didn't they also have keys for the numbers 0 to 9, for a total number of keys of 36, total number of lamps of 36, number of roter teeth 36 etc. Obviously it would be hard to add more lamps, keys, roter teeth and plug board holes increasing them all from 26 to 36, but that increase would give you the ability to send numbers as well as words. I guess without that to send a number you must type out the word of the number, so to send 273 you would need to send the message "two seven three".

[@cigmorfil4101]

The German military took the commercial machine and tweaked it slightly, so you'll need to go back to the 1920s to ask the inventor that. I don't know Morse, but I suspect numbers take a lot of keying and as letters could encypher to numbers, an approx 2/5 or 40% of a message could end up as numbers requiring more transmission with greater chance of error. However the amount of numbers in a message could be quite small so you're trading convenience of plaintext for increased cypher text length in morse code. A "shift" system for numbers could possibly be used, but you want to avoid giving hints to eavesdroppers, along with worrying about how you handle the unshift being lost. Spelling numbers has the advantage that any errors in transmission/reception can be easily corrected (at expense of message length).

[@prasanth.mahendran]

700 U boats was destroyed due to decoding this machine

[@leemoore5212]

Not really. Only about 750 U boats were lost in the Battle of the Atlantic, by no means all of them by enemy action. And obviously hundreds of them would have been sunk even if BP had never decrypted anything. The figures for U boat sinkings show a steady rise throughout the war, but then the number of U boats to sink also rose. The period March - November 1942 when Bletchley Park lost Shark - ie couldn't decrypt enemy messages, doesn't actually show a change in the trend of U boat sinkings. (Though it does show an increase in Allied shipping losses.) The figures for U boat sinkings start getting alarming (for the Germans) with increasing Allied long distance air cover, and the introduction of centimetric radar in 1943. In reality a whole host of things contributed to the Allies winning the Battle of the Atlantic, definitely including cracking naval Enigma. But the intelligence gained from this was probably more important for routing convoys away from U boat packs, than in actually sinking U boats. Which was of course important - the object of the exercise was to ship material across the Atlantic, not to sink U boats for the sake of it. But if you're interested in sinking U boats per se, it was more to do with increasing air cover, more escorts, better radar, Leigh lights and so on.

[@upiknguk]

how german think about make this crucial invention? still amazing and beyond

[@ShannonCarpenter-dr1tt]

What the hell are you doing . Do not touch my machine . You don't even have gloves on. You are in trouble SOURCE

[@nateplayzTV]

Jared owen made me come here

[@rustycherkas8229]

@00:30 - Is it necessary to "swap" the meaning of 'right' and 'left' when talking about Enigma? OOPS! 😆😆

[@flisko123]

how the fuck did they crack this bak in da day

[@Amine06200]

Shift + 3 rotors + electric code change everyday (A exempl change seven time)

[@Kalpanapardhi1]

using enigma machine now: science and engineering education purposes using enigma machine then: *illegal*

[@---yr9of]

It must be from aliens which Bob Lazar talks about.

[@larryrobinson6914]

War winner

[@GCKteamKrispy]

Imagine Alan Turing would be German

[@dasboot5903]

Better NOT !!!! :o)

[@Jeffrey314159]

The Poles broke the Enigma Cipher first!

[@siriusleto3758]

@@Jeffrey314159 What were the Polish scientists who did this?

[@indronilganguly9715]

@@siriusleto3758 it was maria rejewski but it was getting too much time taking so alan turin helped to build a machine which would do it much faster

[@beeman1246]

@@indronilganguly9715 No. Polish scientist broke the code before 1936. But just before World War II, Germany added 2 more rotors, and to crack the code, scientists would have to use all the money for it (entrare intelligence department). And that, of course, was too expensive.

[@krukpolny8505]

ENIGMA POLAND. You Tube.

[@AnotherUser1000]

Wolfenstein, anyone?...

[@wadep9916]

He took it apart, it will never work now! LoL

[@aeaeeaoiauea]

but it works

[@SirBaited]

It still works tho

[@gauravazazel]

Enigma to eugenia

[@manfredloch798]

Ein Land was solche Ingenieure hervorbrachte wird heuts von einer Frau Baerbock repräsentiert.

[@dmitri9403]

wie bestellt so geliefert

[@MikkelThor]

School project

[@jamilsouzagodoisouzagodoy1099]

Porque vocês não dublam essa Droga???! Não somos obrigados a saber essa língua horrível!!!....

[@Ab-ym8gk]

Still used by Russians even today