Can I break an uncracked Enigma code message?
You can certainly have a try. Point your browser at http://tinyurl.com/lj94b, read the instructions, download the software and let your PC do the rest. The M4 Message Breaking project, led by Stephan Krah in Utrecht, has two still-uncracked messages encoded by the German Enigma system from the second world war and monitored by the Allies in the North Atlantic on November 25, 1942. Now, advances in computing power mean that we can apply what the geniuses at Bletchley Park could not: an optimised brute-force solution. The Enigma machine, invented in 1924, used three or four “rotors”; given a “plugboard” extra, the four-rotor version could encode plain text into any of 158 million million million combinations. Its only flaw, from a cryptographer’s point of view, was that it never encoded the same letter the same way. Thus original signals with identical beginnings – because they were made at the same time of day, for example weather reports – revealed some of the underlying codes used. (W
