What you need to do is play against their weaknesses by turning them into your strengths (yes it sounds trite but it is nevertheless true). That’s a threat I’ve been thinking about after a conversation with P some years ago and it turns out there are several ways to beat it. OTOOH, if “they” want your comms, they will just use a $5 wrench. Of course, this would be at a disadvantage against more modern ciphers, if those modern ciphers were done on a trustworthy (not a “trusted”) system. OTOH, Snefru was designed (again IIRC) to be efficiently implemented in software on non-bleeding-edge machines. Probably the former, as IIRC Lucifer was vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis (hence the “odd” changes made at NSA suggestion), but it can be implemented on a 8-bit computer from the 1970s, so there is that. Why they didn’t just use a software simulator and lower their CAPEX, I don’t know, but maybe they had been following Clive and taken his (excellent) advice to have the security endpoints “outside” the communications endpoint.Īnyway, were i to do this (“historical” cipher over “modern” comm channel), I’d probably start with Snefru or Lucifer. J1:16 I have considered such a thing, and there was an episode of the US “Sherlock in or times” series “Elemental” which involved one of the villains using an Enigma. Honours are reserved for hierarchy baboons in both the military and civil service and those in industry who either push weapons of war into third world countries or give generous kick backs to political funds in return not just for honours but no look lucrative contracts… The UK still has a very bad attitude to creators and scientists. However from his work in the US a military high resiliance network was built which is still in use in NATO countries, and a spin off in most other parts of the world as well, which most know as either the Internet or Web. He was still living under this cloud when he died of a serious illness. Unfortunately the British authorities played dirty yet again and had Welchman put into a legal limbo where his security clearance was revoked and they threatened to prosecute as at that time things were getting “political” in Britain. It lead to a bitter row and Welchman leaving Britain for the US, where he wrote his book. However Welchman did not officially get credit, apparently that went to “Doc” Kean who made the engineering drawings up from Welchman’s sketches. Apparently what blew Turings sicks off was when he sketched out the diagonal board design infront of Turing. Eventually he was told about the Turing bombe after he had exolained his own method. On approaching his managment he was initially given the cold shoulder. He did this in his spare time over about a three week period. However Gordon Welchman was brought in compleatly uninitiated and came up with a design for his own bombe in issolation not knowing of Turings previous work. The story is Turing took considerable time to improve the Polish bomba possibly due to having to spend quite a bit of time dealing with incompetent managment. Sadly, Bletchley didn’t use Rejewki and company. Welchman came up with the diagonal board which cut down false stops. That’s not to say I would not like to own one, I could add it to my collection of cold war spy-sets and similar bits such as the 807 based antenna amplifier from a Y-Station. All in all even in a software implementation they really are not worth the effort from a security perspective. That’s not to say that rotor machines can not be secure in certain circumstances, but you really need to know what you are doing with wiring the rotors and stepping them. In essence you can ignore them and break the rotor polyalphabetic cipher then do a fairly simple “fix-up” frequency analysis to get the plain text. Nor will any rotor machine that uses an Enigma style “reflector”, “predictable rotor stepping”, or deficient rotor wiring…Īlso the “plug board” and “hour box” whilst apparently adding many many more states actually do not do that much as they become a simple substitution cipher for the whole time they are in use at any given setting. As a security researcher it really is important for you to emphasize that the four-rotor design is not secure
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