After Enigma

With all the recent talk of electronic surveillance, the NSA, and FISA, I want to point out a sidebar to the history of surveillance and cryptography. Three encoded Nazi messages—products of the famed Enigma encryption system—that had gone unbroken since WWII are being deciphered by a group of amateurs using networked computers via the Internet. The first message itself is of little historical significance (a sub diverting its route) but this gives us a chance to pause and see how cryptography has evolved.

The Enigma itself was a remarkable machine. Looking like a manual typewriter, with some extra wheels and controls on the side, it allowed for levels of variations upon variations to be put into an encryption. According to an NSA description, the theoretical number of possible Enigma configurations (that is different encryption systems it can come up with) is

3,283,883,513,796,974,198,700,
882,069,882,752,878,379,955,261,
095,623,685,444,055,315,226,006,
433,615,627,409,666,933,182,371,
154,802,769,920,000,000,000

The idea was to constantly change the encryption method, thus you couldn’t use previous messages to help decrypt new messages.

Against this little machine, the Allies threw the best and brightest mathematical minds they could find, Alan Turing (the “father of modern computing”) being the best known. They were housed in Bletchley Park, outside of London and used every available means from paper and pencil to proto-computers (along with commando raids by forces trying to get an actual Enigma machine) to attack the Enigma cipher.

In other words, the resources of the Allied powers of WWI were devoted to cracking codes that, ultimately, were broken by enthusiasts and their home computers networked via the internet. Of course I’m exaggerating a bit. Today’s code breakers stand on the shoulder s of giants and have lots if history to fall back on concerning techniques that had already failed. But it is an astounding feat nonetheless and brings into sharp contrast that when we talk about the super-empowered individuals of today (to use Thomas Friedman’s term), that empowerment is not only about the fact that individuals can conceivable build weapons of mass destruction, but also that computers and communications infrastructure make such incredible code-breaking feats feasible for non-state actors. We talk a lot about the power of the individual to encrypt communications or cracking copy protection codes on, say DVDs. But here are individuals gong head-to-head with military encryption and beating the (encryption) system.

One closing point that is tangentially related. During the Bletchley Park efforts, the Americans and the British did not always get along. The Americans suspected that the British were not sharing all their information (the British, as it turns out, had captured an Enigma machine form a German U-boat but hadn’t disclosed that). Turing was sent to the U.S. to smooth ruffled feathers. After his meeting with the U.S. government crypto crowd, he wrote:

“Generally speaking, their attitude is so purely mechanical and mathematical that they often fail to see the wood for the trees and do not like to admit that experience and a knowledge of immediately prior developments, combined with a little manual work, may often produce the answer more quickly than machinery.
“I am persuaded that one cannot very well trust these people where a matter of judgement in cryptography is concerned.”

Lets hope that this part of the analogy does not carry forward.