How good is the Enigma code system compared to today’s publicly available cryptography systems?

2016-08-06 1:16 am
I reckon pretty bad considering The Enigma machine used a “rolling substitution cypher” which means that it was essentially a (much more) complicated version of “A=1, B=2, C=3, …”. The problem with substitution cyphers is that if parts of several messages are the same then you can compare their similarities to break the code. Enigma was broken in part because of German formality (most messages started with the same formal greeting). Even worse, since some letters are more common than others (e.g., “e” and “g”) you can make progress by just counting up how often letters show up in the code (or even get an idea of what language the code is written in without breaking it!). Substitution cypher are so easy to break that some folk do it for fun. Rolling substitution cyphers can use a set of several encoding schemes and cycle through which code is used or make the scheme dependent on the previous letter, but this merely makes the code breaking more difficult. Ultimately, all substitution cyphers suffer from the same difficulty: similar messages produce similar looking codes.
So I was wondering if we an crck it with reletive ease today how was it seen as unbreakable, much like the titanic was unsinkable and ww1 was the war to end wars, early media???

回答 (2)

2016-08-06 3:00 am
✔ 最佳答案
Enigma, in a modern version, is 100% reliable. With modern computers, it's simple to create a cypher with a couple million different random substitutions for each character. And then you would need a few hundred million similar example messages to have any chance of breaking it...and even then it's simple to just burn each sub when used so there are never any repeats.

I made one as a challenge for my computer science club at school. Nobody has ever claimed the prize, but you're welcome to try: https://www.reddit.com/r/security/comments/4bp8oj/unbreakable_encryption_contest_100_prize/?sort=new
Also posted here with a lot more discussion: http://hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=5213186

The encrypted message is an email address and a phrase. Send that phrase to that email address and you win.
2016-08-06 1:20 am
In it's time Enigma was great and much money and time were dedicated to cracking the Enigma.


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