Lorenz: Hitler's "Unbreakable" Cipher Machine
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- čas přidán 6. 09. 2014
- Many people have heard of Enigma before, the code machine used by Nazi Germany to send secret coded messages. Yet, some very clever code breakers were able to break that code and read those messages!
But there was another cipher machine used by the Germans in WWII called the Lorenz machine, and this machine was even more difficult than Enigma, and was used by the top level of the Nazi Party.
However the code breakers at Bletchley Park broke this code too, and could read secret messages from people like Adolf Hitler himself!
It was mathematician Bill Tutte who discovered the breakthrough that allowed the Lorenz code to be broken. On the 10th of September 2014 a new memorial to Bill Tutte is unveiled in his hometown of Newmarket. Have a look at the Bill Tutte Memorial website at billtuttememorial.org.uk/
Hi. This is John Tiltman's grandson in Hawaii saying Hello, and thanks for letting these geniuses reveal to us the value of study and discipline, beyond what most of us are capable. Aloha.
Oh wow. That's wonderful. Thanks for watching.
Does your family have any stories about what your grandfather put himself through to pull the key out of this machine? Or did he never say anything about his part in ULTRA?
I think it was during a tour at Bletchley Park that I heard the funding of the Colossus was rejected because they thought it would take too long to build and the war would already be over, so Tommy Flowers built it himself using his own money. After the war he was reimbursed. I think it was £2000.
Great story, great video. Everyone should visit!
That £108k in today's money!!!
I mean the figure sounds right, but that is way more than people usually have in savings
That was so fascinating. Man those were some clever people to work that out without ever seeing a machine!
I guess you could say this Athens-Vienna message was the Lorenz' rosetta stone.
the inventor of the machine also deserves credit for actually creating it
They need to make a movie about this to get the recognition it deserves.
I love that they figured out how the machine works without seeing it , that's pure genius grade stuff.
I love how they spent so much time and effort to create these incredible machines and they end up being cracked because someone just gets lazy.
You hide behind the word love but in fact you're feeling schadenfreude. Don't pretend.
As is the case in a lot of computer security.
Humans are almost always the weakest part of the chain.
If cyber security experts had their way, every password would be a random str of characters stored in a password vault.
Yet people would create passwords like 12345 if they were allowed
@@emilyscloset2648 sure,
and if enigma and lorenz were alive today they could be cracked by cat videos let say. Got more wisdom to spit?
@@emilyscloset2648wrong.. cyber security EXPERTS know the length of the password is more important than the complexity... The password: Thequickbrownfixjumpedoverthelazy7dog is stupid easy to remember but a super computer would churn on it until the end of the universe and not crack it 5:02
The visuals in this video were really well done!
Hero of the Beach The bits of card?
The lighting in general and also the cards, but the angled label overlays on the machine were what stood out to me. Very, very nice.
Also, that's a really cool shirt.
That all due to our filmmaker Ben.
He's a heck of a guy!
singingbanana That's also because you're stunning ;)
Those Bletchley Park guys were just brilliant!
Fantastic. The guys working at Blechley Park during wartime were absolutely geniuses...
It was subsequently found out after the war, that Colossus could also compute simple arithmetic. 2 Machines went to GCHQ, and lasted until the mid 60's
A video about the Purple Code would be interesting.
Pls explain? What was Purple Code??
Bletchly park has a load of amazing things from the first computers to games and evolution of storage
Wonderfully done! Thank you so much for your constant quality content.
Was worried that you had stopped uploading more videos. Glad to see a cool new video after 4 months.
Goddamn! what a great maths story! Imagining all the mathematicians, codebreaker and linguists collaborating to defeat a machine they've never even seen sounds so thrilling.
It would have been just really frustrating
wow this was _super_ interesting :D
Thanks for making it!
Thanks very much.
Astonishing that the Lorentz device is so little known!
It was far rarer than Enigma. Unlike Enigma which was ultimately a perfected version of the civilian Enigma this was custom made and secret.
@@florinivan6907 The code breakers had their work cut out for them. BE SAFE & WELL!
Nice to watch this after hearing you talk about it in person. Well presented and explained!
That was a beautiful video, absolutely intriguing and learned many things from it. Thank you so much, James.
Thanks for the video, it was great as always! I'd never heard of this machine, and I agree it ought to be as well known as the Enigma machine.
I'm actually a little freaked out. I recently designed a second enigma machine in Minecraft, and it works in a way that's eerily similar to how this one works! It encodes letters into five digit binary strings (say, 10101, where '1' is on and 0 is 'off'), then the "rotors" make a sequence of decisions on whether or not to negate the signal of each number, (so say the rotors were set to YYNYN where Y = yes, negate and N = no, don't negate) then you press 10101 and return 01111, and when you think about it, all it is is a series of five XOR gates - if you think of Y as 1 and N as 0, then you can think of YYNYN as 11010, then it's just the whole "if they're different, then output 1, if they're the same, output 0", which is equivalent to the function in this machine! Check it out on my channel :)
Alex McGaw That sounds very similar!
I never dreamed that code making and breaking was so sophisticated for its time period! Thanks for another interesting video!!!!!
The people who broke these codes (rightly) get a lot of glory, but what of the people who devised them in the first place? Is devising a code like this easier than cracking it?
+Badatstuff The breakers got absolutely no glory... the existence of the Colossus machine was a state secret... Churchill ordered most of them destroyed, and all involved were sworn to secrecy... see, the Lorenz machines were still in use up until 1960! Tommy Flowers designed the first fully digital computer, and never got the credit... Eckert and Mauchly got the credit for Eniac instead. The information was only recently declared non-secret. AFA the inventor of the Lorenz machine, it was very derivative of the Enigma, which had been around for over a decade before WW2... inventing a breakable code does not bring glory! Read the recent book _Colossus_ for more.
Wonderfully produced video. I wonder though; do you write a script which you then read from during the taping, or do you simply know the progression of what you want to talk about so well that it just happens to be very fluent. What I mean is, I noticed you don't pause, or make little pause sounds like "umm". So either you're very very well spoken, or you're good at keeping one eye on cue cards and another on the lens of the camera. I ask only because I'm curious, and because I'd love to know if there really is anybody who can learn to keep such amazing consistency in their monologue when it involves delivering exact factual information like you do.
McJaews This might be dull for other people. I write a script, and film it in one or two minute chunks. No autocue, I just have to remember short sections at a time. That seems to work best for me.
Numberphile is done differently, that is just a conversation and Brady has to edit around the mistakes.
singingbanana It's still impressive how you're able to keep the delivery so consistent:) Then again, you're a pretty bright guy:P
Hadn't heard of the Lorenz machines/cipher before - thanks! The video/presentation was fantastic, too!
Great explanation of how the Lorenz cipher machine worked and how it's code was broken by British mathematicians. Good stuff!
Thank you Dr James, great video! I'm much obliged with you and Brady Haran for making me love Maths again:) school destroied my passion for sience, phisics and maths but people like you and other professors at the university of Nottingham lightened it again :)
I loved this video! I think i was in a trance, great production, info, learned alot!, and you got all that in 12 minutes! I wouldn't mind longer videos even, not at all.. tnx to all those that were sworn to secrecy and you bringing light to some of there achievements!
Mirek Heikkila Thanks a lot!
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Great video! I really enjoy the work you do, it's really interesting.
Thanks man. Love your content :) Been a while now.
A nice video on a subject I find endlessly fascinating. Thanks.
Wonderful video Dr. i enjoy you most of all on numberphile, you make abstract math(s) etc fun to listen to and practice.
James love the videos! :D
Please do continue to post them! :D
I just knew the Lorenz was far more important. I was sooo pleased to see another recognition for Tutte and Tunny story made! Well don Dr James Grime. I believe Lorenz story will equally get the recognition as Enigma, hopefully one day soon, if the media out there work hard on it.
absolutely fantastic video as always, the maths involved in cryptography always baffles and interests me, your talk on the enigma machine and this video have been absolutely fantastic
Love this video! James Grime is my favorite mathematician; he's the only one I learn anything from. >_
4 months, sir, 4 months... Kept me waiting. Anyways - to me this has been one of your best videos!
I´ve watched carefully all of your videos about code breaking. I´ve even watched your whole 50min presentation about Enigma. Man, you´re good at getting young lads like this kid over here encouraged into learning all sorts of new stuff in our spare time.
So, let me tell you: I´m a fan.
***** That's why I do it! Thank you!
Maybe someday I´ll actually grow enough courage to make my own educational videos. That´d be fantastic! Thank YOU.
Great video. It's a shame that these great mathematicians didn't get the credit they deserved when they achieved these feats but that's the cost of secrecy. Videos like this help show the unsung heroes of wars.
Thank you, I had not heard of the Lorenz machine before - fascinating!
Absolutely Amazing! I love stuff like this and I am going to share this with all my friends, we are all huge math/code/numbers guys.
Don't see many videos with like: dislike ratio 1000. Well earnt James. Great info.
Great video. I love mysterious World War 2 technology like this.
Fascinating video Jim!
I'm intrigued by what you said about the psi wheels at 3:55 - "They don't move with any regular pattern". You explain they're controlled by the 2 motor wheels in the middle. Are those 2 motor wheels generating random motion? If so, how do they do it?
AlanKey86 Yup, so the motor wheels also have pins on the outside. The first mu wheel has 61 pins (and so has a rotation of 61), and the second mu wheel has 37 pins (and a rotation of 37). Each pin can be set to on or off, so you can create a fairly random string of on and offs as the wheels move.
The first mu wheel moves for every character. If the pin on the first mu wheel is switched on, it will move the second mu wheel. If the pin on the second mu wheel is switched on, it will move the five psi-wheels.
singingbanana
I guess it's no coincidence that 41, 61, and 37 are all prime? Perhaps you could do a Numberphile at some point about exactly why that's significant? Would a 36-pin wheel be really easy to decode because of all its factors?
rebmcr Yup, the wheel rotations were coprime giving the longest possible rotational period. I didn't have time to include good stuff like that.
singingbanana You really should make a video about that though, I am currently reading "Cryptonomicon" and it was explained in a really nice way in that book.
ALAN
Awesome video. Very interesting and very well done. Thanks for sharing it with us.
This is awsome! At my level of competency I can understand about the narrowing down to rules of enumeration to isolate the set in which the solutions are, and the non-carry binary addition in the key and its cancelation jumped out at me. Great video!
Awesome video, as per usual. I had a question though: do You (or anyone) know of any "Lorenz machine simulators" for the computer? I have seen a few before, but they seem outdated now. Would be fun and interesting, and potentially raise a bit of awareness too!
great production value, keep it up!
Hey dude, this is the best youtube video ive watched today. Awesome info !
Thank you!
Wonderful video and explanation. It's incredible what the code breakers were able to accomplish with mostly pencil and paper. Thank you for the education!
That was very interesting, thank you. How come the look of your video has changeant so much? I like this super professional look:)
If you visit The National Museum of Computing you can also see Colossus which was used to work out the wheel positions. No need to pay entry to Bletchley Park.
This video is simply brillent! Great job James! (the "brillent" was on purpose")
This was a great video. Really enjoyed it.
Thanks James, that was really interesting! :D
Yay! You're back! :D
Woo, I was at Bletchley Park last week, and now you post this, just perfect. I didn't have the time/will to read about the Lorenz there so thanks. By the way, was it closed when you did the video? It's surprising noone's there.
dsiefus No they didn't close it off. But we filmed first thing in the morning, and it takes people sometime to reach the Lorenz bit. We finished around 11.30 and there was a crowd by then.
As soon as all this corona malarkey is out of the way and the place opens up again, I can't wait to plan a visit to Bletchley Park.
The crazy thing is that the cypher it used, the one time pad, creates perfect secrecy. If they had never encoded two messages with the same key it would have been impossible to crack. What I'm really impressed with is that the code breakers knew to try the OTP having seen only the coded messages.
+fsmv _"The crazy thing is that the cypher it used, the one time pad, ..."_
It was not a one-time-pad; the key would repeat. The period was very long, but it did repeat.
8 dislikes? They're probably from IBM.
for real.... why on earth could/would you dislike a clear explanation of a very complicated process????
Every single video on youtube has at least a tiny amount of dislikes. I think there might be a few number of bots that auto dislike a lot of things.
Dislikes probably comes from Sweden.
The mathematician Arne Buerling solved the first two versions of this machines with paper and pencil.
Then the result was flown to England.
No comment of that would give a thumbs down...
@@perolovson1715 Arne Beurling is most famous for breaking the Siemens und Halske T52 which was a different machine used in the same network. This was an amazing accomplishment though, and definitely deserves a mention. FRA also broke the Lorentz in 1943.
The Lorenz was also the basis for immediate postwar wheel-based cypher machines used by the British and the Russians....some say until the 1960s. The breaking of it was so secret and the Colossus2 machines that did the job were destroyed on Churchills orders, except for 2 units which were sent to GCHQ and used with modifications to decode the Russian machines.
At 1:32 you mention that the machine would add a random letter. I think the whole point is that the letter was not actually random, but chosen by the algorithm of the wheels. If it were truly random the code would be unbreakable (basically a one-time pad). Thank you for the interesting topic though, never heard of this machine before.
I lost him after the second sentence. What extraordinary men they were. A few years ago there was an empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, which they wanted to put a statue on, but couldn't think of who to put on. Considering this nation has a few million worthy of the honour, I can't understand why they put the person on they did (another story) however, I wrote and suggested Tommy Flowers. I did not get a reply and Tommy never went on, as we don't celebrate genius anymore, we celebrate diversity instead.
wow this was super interesting :D Thanks for making it!
Awesome video. Is it for something else? Cause it seems VERY professional
Yakul I just had help. I'll probably be back to filming in my living room soon.
Excellent! Your best episode; great job.
Really interesting. I didn't know about the Lorenz machine.
Heh, I''ve seen Colossus, and it's pretty impressive. But the ingenuity of those code-breakers is, in my opinion, a little bit more impressive.
Great video! Would have been nice if you'd have explained how the machine was operated, especially since it looks like there is a lot more automation than with the Enigma (coils, a gauge, etc.)
The Lorenz machine was attached to a regular teleprinter, so you set up the Lorenz machine for enciphering, and typed your message into the teleprinter. The recipient's teleprinter had a Lorenz machine with the same settings, so it decoded automatically and its teleprinter produced the original message. Unlike the Enigma machine, neither person ever saw, nor needed to see, the enciphered version of the message. You could also prepare your message on punched tape and feed that through the teleprinter on 'auto' mode. The error that the Lorenz operator made came about because 4000 characters is quite long to have to type in all over again. It was poor atmospheric conditions that caused the operator to have to send the message again, and it was actually because he changed the message a little bit that Tiltman was able to disentangle them.
Amusingly, this is exactly how certain piece of ransomware worked just a while back.
That one turned out to be fairly easily cracked by anyone with a backup of any single file encrypted by the program since the key = original XOR encrypted.
So the Lorentz machine used a simple XOR cipher (essentially a one-time pad, but reused).
Thechnically, computers are anything which can calculate, compute stuff (hence the word "computer") and doesn't even need to be electrical (like Matt's domino calculator). In some languages, the words "to calculate" and "to compute" translates to only one word and/ or the language only has imported one of both word. A double example in German: "to calculate" and "to compute" translates to "rechnen" (the German, non-lean word for computer is called "Rechner" and a pocket calculator is called "Tachenrechner" there) and its prefixed variations or the Germanised word "kalkulieren" but "computieren" (and "komputieren" for the matter) doesn't exists (yes, we have imported the word "computer" but I talked about the verb).
As such, code machines are machinal computers as opposide to our mostly electrical computers and they were much older ones, excluding brains.
Great job! Very professional.
In Simon Singh's "The Codebook" he talks about something else the Germans used, called a "One-time pad cypher" which is apparently unbreakable, but also very impractical. Could you maybe do a follow-up video on that?
LaMaisondeCasaHouse I've done something on it before The curious case of the WWII carrier pigeon and the unbreakable code
Now that's what I call prompt service! TY!
The name lorenz rings a bell in my mind. Did he also have something to do with fractals?
Imagine if someone was up late working the night before (and sleep-deprived) and then watched this video and nodded off during the middle, waking up just in time to hear "if you have been, thanks for watching." No "you're welcome" needed in that case, I suppose!
I love these kinds of videos about secret codes and how code breakers figured them out. Are there any other machines like this one and the enigma?
+ExtraFormula
There were lots of different cipher machines, such as SIGABA (US), TypeX (UK), Purple (Japan), and more. Google will find them for you.
Great video. I prefer your appearances on your own channel than on Numberphile
The Bill Tutte Memorial website at billtuttememorial.org.uk/ has a really lovely and well done tribute to Professor Tutte.
Interesting stuff! Thanks James
Well done James Grime! But you did not mention a great man Captain Jerry Roberts, who was a leading Lorenz codebreaker by at Bletchley Park, he worked closely with Bill Tutte. I have heard his told at BP since 2007, and many of his other talks.
For more details about Lorenz story, please watch Captain Jerry Roberts’ talk at UCL 2008. Capt. Jerry Roberts: My Top Secret Codebreaking at Bletchley Park 1941 to 45 also in his another video clip he was in 2010: Capt. Jerry Roberts: I broke Hitler's top-secret Lorenz code, at Bletchley 1941-45
4 months without post? No more vacations for you...
why would anyone dislike this.
I am now a little upset with the education system. I had been taught that Colossus was built to decode enigma not lorenz. Thank you Dr. Grime for educating the masses.
The Nazi's are famous for their complicated code machines. This makes me wonder, did the Allies have code machines of their own? If so, how did they work, and why don't we hear more about them?
I just remembered that we had the Navajo code talkers. I still wonder if this was all.
Landon Kryger The British had TypeX and the US had SIGABA. Both were Enigma rip-offs. They were harder to break than Enigma because the rotors moved more frequently or less predictably. They were not broken by the German, but they had different priorities. Enigma is now famous because it was broken.
Because we won and the winners tend to not give up all of their secrets, especially considering we were aware we would be entering interesting times with the Soviets.
+singingbanana _"The British had TypeX and the US had SIGABA. Both were Enigma rip-offs."_
I don't know much about TypeX, but SIGABA was definitely not a ripoff of Enigma. About the only thing they had in common was that they used rotors, and Enigma was not the first rotor machine.
SIGABA had 15 rotors. Five were used for encryption. The next five produced signals that were fed to the third set of five, The output of the third set controlled the rotation of the encrypting rotors.
One of the staff at Bletchley Park told me that TypeX was indeed a ripoff of Enigma, and the British feared violating patents even though the war was soon to breakout :P
Absolutely fascinating
All true, but the hand / letter/ language skills were always necessary to generate a break, to then exploit via colussus
The Lorenz machine cipher is quite similar to the one-time pad.
"XOR padding", like the Lorenz used, is fatally broken by using the same key again on two different texts. Today we use nonces to avoid this.
that's basically xor cypher before computers
+Franc[e]sco The lorenz machine might be a computer, depending on your definition.
+DaffyDaffyDaffy33322 Not in the slightest... purely mechanical sequencer. It could do nothing but scramble.
the purchasers that paid nine and a half pounds for a lorenze code breaking machine from someone who didn't know what he had should be ashamed for taking advantage of this person.
I love this old cryto stuff. Much fun is had, and it's a great way to be introduced into the modern setup of things. I'd love to see more =)
Hello, could somebody explain me the method used by Bill Tutte, with the rows and the pattern, please ? Thank you !
I don't even understand math, but this was pretty damn cool
This one is quite a leap in terms of production value :P. Keep it up!
Summary for non-cryptography fans
1.There are 5 right wheels called Chi-wheels.They move with every keypress.
There are 5 left wheels called Psi-wheels.They move when the Mu wheels told them to.
There are 2 middle wheels called Mu-wheels.They move with every keypress.
2.Each letter has 5 symbols,either cross or dot.
3.Plaintext letter+Key letter=Ciphertext letter
Here is how.Each symbol of PL adds with each symbol of KL.
If both symbols are the same,it is a dot.If both symbols are different,it is a cross.
4.Lorenz cipher is a symmetric cipher.It means enciphering the ciphertext recreates the plaintext.
Awesome!! :D
I love videos about this stuff. :]
Absolutely love theses crypto/history videos!! Your ability to explain the brilliance of these geniuses makes these fascinating to watch. Thanks for all the excellent content!!
I saw a documentary on Tutte and Flowers not too long ago.
Excellent video. Please keep em coming.