Unbroken Enigma Message(enigma.hoerenberg.com)
enigma.hoerenberg.com
Unbroken Enigma Message
https://enigma.hoerenberg.com/index.php?cat=Unbroken
45 コメント
I read it again last year and picked up on a few things that had slipped past my understanding the first time around. I had originally assumed that the present day Enoch Root was the child of Bobby's Nordic girlfriend, but it was obviously not the case upon my second reading. A few web searches revealed the supernatural nature of Root.
I always wondered if Stephenson chose the name "Enoch Root" on a dare, or maybe he has some other story. It's probably something related to an "Enterprise NOC Root" computer account.
I always wondered if Stephenson chose the name "Enoch Root" on a dare, or maybe he has some other story. It's probably something related to an "Enterprise NOC Root" computer account.
Enoch is a character in multiple biblical stories:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_(ancestor_of_Noah)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_(son_of_Cain)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_(ancestor_of_Noah)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_(son_of_Cain)
Yes and when Neal was asked about Enoch during a speaking appearance, he noted that Enoch was one of the first people in the bible whose death wasn't recorded/noted. Apparently, most people early in the bible that were mentioned had both birth/death notated. At some point they stopped bothering with so many new parties introduced and he was one of (if not the) first to not have their story/death brought to a conclusion.
"...the child of Bobby's Nordic girlfriend..." does have a role in the modern-day episodes (probably). I didn't figure this out until my second or third reading.
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A great book. If you want to explorer some of the same themes I recommend his Baroque cycle, which carries on with other characters that are the current charecters distant ancestors.
If you enjoyed Cryptonomicon and like Stephenson, don't read the Baroque cycle. Skip his work forward until Reamde.
Serendipitous, I'm also about 75% of the way through!
It's one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. Perhaps the most.
I very highly recommend it, though I imagine much of HN's audience has done so or is at least aware of it.
It's one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. Perhaps the most.
I very highly recommend it, though I imagine much of HN's audience has done so or is at least aware of it.
Please reply your take when you are 99% of the way through
I had the exact same thought. There is no feeling like the frustration of a disappointing ending after being engrossed in a Neal Stephenson book.
When they were paper books at least you could throw them across the room. Now that would break my phone.
When they were paper books at least you could throw them across the room. Now that would break my phone.
I haven't been disappointed by the endings of his more recent novels: Cryptonomicon, Anathem, Seveneves. (I did not enjoy time spent on REAMDE, that being the only exception.)
Of those 3 I was only somewhat happy with Anathem. I couldn't finish REAMDE and Seveneves convinced me that I may not read another one of his books again, unless it debuts to unanimous critical acclaim or something similar. I thought the ending of Cryptonomicon was pretty weak but the rest of the novel leading up to it was so fantastic that I didn't care. Honestly I found the Baroque Cycle to have the best ending of any of his works, and I would describe it as the one time I was happy with both the journey and the destination of a Stephenson novel.
Of those three I was initially least interested in reading Anathem. Maybe as a result, I was most pleasantly surprised by it. Agree that none of these compare to the Baroque Cycle.
Seveneves was frustrating because he spent hundreds of pages setting up a premise worthy of an entire lifetime’s worth of books and then just...stopped. Any other author would write that book and be set for life. Neal Stephenson has no time for that and just moves on to the next pile of ideas in his notebook.
I read Reamde after Dodge and it made a lot more sense
Share your frustration. This one did not disappoint me though
I loved the ending to the baroque cycle, but otherwise. Yeah. This.
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It's .. fine.
To me NS books are not much about the plot though. I'm floored how many things that guy knows and how creatively he connect them.
To me NS books are not much about the plot though. I'm floored how many things that guy knows and how creatively he connect them.
That's true, I don't even remember the ending to Snow Crash which I read some ~6 years ago. The unraveling premise that comes about in the ~3rd quarter of the book is what stuck with me. Think it'll be the same for Cryptonomicon.
I've finished it. I thoroughly loved it. I don't want to go into any spoiling detail if you haven't read it?
It's only been some hours, so I'm honestly still processing a lot of it. I'll definitely be rereading it. It's considerably grander in scale than Snow Crash, his only other Novel I've read so far, but I'm quite excited to read his other novels.
It's only been some hours, so I'm honestly still processing a lot of it. I'll definitely be rereading it. It's considerably grander in scale than Snow Crash, his only other Novel I've read so far, but I'm quite excited to read his other novels.
I'm also 75% of the way through... my fourth read-through. It's notable how my opinion of the major characters changes each time I read it.
The audiobook narrated by the author is just hilarious.
I was alternating reading with listening for fun.
I was alternating reading with listening for fun.
Is there any possibility the cyphertext is wrong? Either generated with a bug, someone hit the wheel halfway through, copied down wrong, etc? Is there a checksum that authenticates this as a valid cyphertext?
A common assumption about this message has long been that some sort of mistake was made somewhere, probably not in the machine but in the setup of the machine, transcription of the ciphertext, etc.
Some of the other very long-lasting Enigma messages turned out to have probably been transcribed incorrectly either by the original intercept operator or someone down the line, for example---they decode if you swap out certain similar letters. This is particularly likely since a lot of key material and other useful documents have been recovered post-war to help with the analysis.
This particular message is particularly interesting due to its origin... U-534 is a German U-boat that was, unusually, recovered after the war. It's now a museum piece. While it was full of water that did a lot of damage, there were some documents on board that were still legible... including the Schlüsselzettel for this message, which is basically a worksheet used by the radio operator to decode messages. It's linked to from the article, along with Dan Girard's theory of why this particular Schlüsselzettel was filled out in an unusual way and missing plaintext... the radio operator at first made a mistake, and then realized that the message wasn't actually intended for (or decodable) by them, so they set it aside.
U-534's recovered documents lead to no small number of interesting Enigma messages, and the linked website has a big focus on them. They specifically reject the claim made by some that U-534 had a specially modified or possibly even broken Enigma machine, since other messages from the boat decode properly.
Enigma cryptanalysis is a very interesting hobby, since the Enigma machine is complex enough to be formidable but still simple enough to be amenable to human attacks. It's also a bit challenging from the perspective of someone used to modern cryptography, because the operation of the rotor machines is very different from modern cryptography, and because both older and modern writing about them uses a lot of terminology and methods developed at Bletchley Park that is not often used elsewhere---it seems to have been the culture of British intelligence, or at least the code-breaking type, to name things after inside jokes. This leads to odd things like Banburismus and Testery.
The Enigma was not the only rotor machine in use by the Germans during the second world war, and not the most advanced either. A more complex evolution of the rotor machine concept, code named "Tunny" by the British, was used for fixed radio links (it was too large and delicate to be practical for naval applications), and Bletchley Park mounted a huge effort to decode it was well, which lead to the development of an electromechanical computer called Colossus. In the essay collection "Colossus," edited by B. Jack Copeland, authors contend that Colossus is a major milestone in computer history, more significant than the Bombe designed for Enigma messages, which has been largely overlooked by historians because most documentation on Colossus remained classified until 2000.
Most interestingly, one author suggests that Colossus was an important precursor to the design of ENIAC which went uncredited because of its classified nature - but several key designers of ENIAC had also been designers of Colossus shortly before. This positions Colossus as a bit of a "missing link" in the development of the programmable computer, since Colossus was modified with limited programmable features similar to ENIAC's more flexible capability.
The 1970 speculative computer film "Colossus" seems to have been an amusing coincidence as knowledge of Colossus was still almost entirely classified at the time.
This particular message is particularly interesting due to its origin... U-534 is a German U-boat that was, unusually, recovered after the war. It's now a museum piece. While it was full of water that did a lot of damage, there were some documents on board that were still legible... including the Schlüsselzettel for this message, which is basically a worksheet used by the radio operator to decode messages. It's linked to from the article, along with Dan Girard's theory of why this particular Schlüsselzettel was filled out in an unusual way and missing plaintext... the radio operator at first made a mistake, and then realized that the message wasn't actually intended for (or decodable) by them, so they set it aside.
U-534's recovered documents lead to no small number of interesting Enigma messages, and the linked website has a big focus on them. They specifically reject the claim made by some that U-534 had a specially modified or possibly even broken Enigma machine, since other messages from the boat decode properly.
Enigma cryptanalysis is a very interesting hobby, since the Enigma machine is complex enough to be formidable but still simple enough to be amenable to human attacks. It's also a bit challenging from the perspective of someone used to modern cryptography, because the operation of the rotor machines is very different from modern cryptography, and because both older and modern writing about them uses a lot of terminology and methods developed at Bletchley Park that is not often used elsewhere---it seems to have been the culture of British intelligence, or at least the code-breaking type, to name things after inside jokes. This leads to odd things like Banburismus and Testery.
The Enigma was not the only rotor machine in use by the Germans during the second world war, and not the most advanced either. A more complex evolution of the rotor machine concept, code named "Tunny" by the British, was used for fixed radio links (it was too large and delicate to be practical for naval applications), and Bletchley Park mounted a huge effort to decode it was well, which lead to the development of an electromechanical computer called Colossus. In the essay collection "Colossus," edited by B. Jack Copeland, authors contend that Colossus is a major milestone in computer history, more significant than the Bombe designed for Enigma messages, which has been largely overlooked by historians because most documentation on Colossus remained classified until 2000.
Most interestingly, one author suggests that Colossus was an important precursor to the design of ENIAC which went uncredited because of its classified nature - but several key designers of ENIAC had also been designers of Colossus shortly before. This positions Colossus as a bit of a "missing link" in the development of the programmable computer, since Colossus was modified with limited programmable features similar to ENIAC's more flexible capability.
The 1970 speculative computer film "Colossus" seems to have been an amusing coincidence as knowledge of Colossus was still almost entirely classified at the time.
(I'm definitely not an expert. Grains of salt encouraged.)
There were no checksums, so incorrect ciphertext is possible.
But Enigma is a stream cipher, so if there was a missing character or someone bumped the wheel halfway through, it should still be possible to find two separate solutions that produce the plaintext before and after the error, respectively.
There were no checksums, so incorrect ciphertext is possible.
But Enigma is a stream cipher, so if there was a missing character or someone bumped the wheel halfway through, it should still be possible to find two separate solutions that produce the plaintext before and after the error, respectively.
That's what I first thought as well... But I guess the machines themselves were accurate enough. I mean, if that could happen it would have happened on a daly basis.
So it looks like there is only one unbroken message left, the others have been broken between 2012-2017. The Enigma@Home project appears to be on hold while they look at different ways of solving. Am I understanding this correctly?
Help crack it with unused CPU cycles and Enigma@Home (uses the BOINC platform):
http://www.enigmaathome.net/
http://www.enigmaathome.net/
I excitedly tried to sign up for this, but they aren't accepting new users.
The page mentions Enigma@Home. How much computation would be required to brute force check all Enigma keys?
Edit: found this on Wikipedia: "the military Enigma has 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 different settings (nearly 159 quintillion or about 67 bits)"
Edit: found this on Wikipedia: "the military Enigma has 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 different settings (nearly 159 quintillion or about 67 bits)"
That's not how it's been broken historically. Breakers leveraged operational errors like the enemy reusing the same key for multiple messages or having messages with standard formats.
haram_masala(1)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon