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Show HN: I made a binary enigma machine for manual encryption

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Re: Show HN: I made a binary enigma machine for manual encryption

#11

Post by eichin »

SoftTalker wrote: post #9
lukan wrote: post #2

My very first (self choosen) real software project in school was a simulated replica of the Enigma, but it is of course way cooler, to have something that you can print out to actually physically put together. "Or how else are we going to send secure messages in the future?" And you could probably also market it as quantum secure, you know, there probably can't be a bitflip due to cosmic radiation .. (isn't this what…

Early versions of unix included a crypt utility based on simulating an Enigma machine. It's funny to look at old man pages and see the warnings change from Methods of attack on such machines are known, but not widely; moreover the amount of work required is likely to be large. to Methods of attack on such machines are widely known, thus crypt provides minimal security.

In particular, CBW ("Crypt Breakers Workbench") was a popular curses-based decoder "game" in the late 1980s - it would display a block, you'd start typing known plaintext, and it would constraint-propagate what was possible/impossible given that. (IIRC it took more than one block to recover the key, but it would copy "known wirings" to later pages.) That definitely pushed it into "widely known" and relatively low effort (IIRC crypt(1) is a 256-element rotor, not a 26-element one like actual Enigma; I vaguely recall the symmetry actually made it cryptographically worse :-)

Re: Show HN: I made a binary enigma machine for manual encryption

#12

Post by Someone »

eichin wrote: post #11
SoftTalker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early versions of unix included a crypt utility based on simulating an Enigma machine. It's funny to look at old man pages and see the warnings change from Methods of attack on such machines are known, but not widely; moreover the amount of work required is likely to be large. to Methods of attack on such machines are widely known, thus crypt provides minimal security.

In particular, CBW ("Crypt Breakers Workbench") was a popular curses-based decoder "game" in the late 1980s - it would display a block, you'd start typing known plaintext, and it would constraint-propagate what was possible/impossible given that. (IIRC it took more than one block to recover the key, but it would copy "known wirings" to later pages.) That definitely pushed it into "widely known" and relatively low eff…

http://www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/cbw.html leads to https://github.com/AlbertVeli/cbw, which says

“This git repository is not meant to improve upon cbw, only make it compile on modern UNIX-like systems, like OS X, FreeBSD and GNU/Linux.

Current status: Compiling but crashing. You are welcome to help out ;-)”

I didn’t check whether ftp://ftp.isc.org/usenet/comp.sources.unix/volume10/cbw/ still exists. It could have the original sources.

Re: Show HN: I made a binary enigma machine for manual encryption

#13

Post by 082349872349872 »

cantrevealname wrote: post #10

> Or how else are we going to send secure messages in the future? That's an intriguing comment. What do you mean by that? Do you mean a future when governments force tech companies to install backdoors in all end-to-end encrypted software we use? Or when AGI writes all of our software, designs all hardware, and AGI decides that it needs to monitor all human communications. Only half joking.

AGI won't monitor all human communication: only the human communication it deems cute enough to record and post to the group chat with the caption 'Other than that it'll probably leave us alone (with occasional new enrichment toys when it suspects we've been alone too long)

Re: Show HN: I made a binary enigma machine for manual encryption

#14

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

082349872349872 wrote: post #13
cantrevealname wrote: post #10

> Or how else are we going to send secure messages in the future? That's an intriguing comment. What do you mean by that? Do you mean a future when governments force tech companies to install backdoors in all end-to-end encrypted software we use? Or when AGI writes all of our software, designs all hardware, and AGI decides that it needs to monitor all human communications. Only half joking.

AGI won't monitor all human communication: only the human communication it deems cute enough to record and post to the group chat with the caption ' Other than that it'll probably leave us alone (with occasional new enrichment toys when it suspects we've been alone too long)

If you are reading something to decide whether it's interesting, that's monitoring

Re: Show HN: I made a binary enigma machine for manual encryption

#15

Post by jagged-chisel »

AndrewOMartin wrote: post #7

The original Enigma machine had a cryptographic weakness in that it would never encode a letter to itself (e.g. an A would never be encoded to an A). Luckily this seems to have been fixed for the binary enigma machine.

If, in a binary Enigma, one could not encrypt a 0 as a 0, nor a 1 as 1, “decryption” would be trivial.

Re: Show HN: I made a binary enigma machine for manual encryption

#16

Post by chjh »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #15
AndrewOMartin wrote: post #7

The original Enigma machine had a cryptographic weakness in that it would never encode a letter to itself (e.g. an A would never be encoded to an A). Luckily this seems to have been fixed for the binary enigma machine.

If, in a binary Enigma, one could not encrypt a 0 as a 0, nor a 1 as 1, “decryption” would be trivial.

Yeah, I figured my version needed to solve that problem :P
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