Breaking Enigma - Exploiting a Pole Position
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- čas přidán 10. 12. 2019
- A look at the mind-numbingly complex task of breaking German Naval Codes in WW2.
First half hour looks at how Enigma worked, 00:32:14 for the history of breaking it.
More info on breaking Enigma - www.ellsbury.com/gne/gne-000.htm
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Pinned post for Q&A :)
Drachinifel as you near 100k subscribers and now you’re open to singing could we have the entire score of the HMS Pinafore as 100k special?
Drachinifel, if the two airship aircraft carriers, USS Akron and Macon survived the storms that downed them, what would be the resulting effect on naval aviation?
How far in the design process do you suspect the later and more obscure IJN projects such as the triple turret heavy cruiser (i.e. Zao from WoWs) were before they were put to the torch? Why is it that we have more information on certain designs/projects such as the B65 than others?
There's only two codes I know of the that are unbreakable. One is RSA or public-key cryptography and the other is a book cypher. The book method encodes by giving the letter three numbers. The page number, paragraph and how many spaces into the that particular line your letter is. You have to have a exact copy of the book that was printed in the same year by the same publisher because in subsequent reprints the page numbers would be off. That method was used in Mel Gibson's movie "Conspiracy Theory" and they used "Catcher In the Rye" as the cypher.
U-505 video?
"One way to crack a code is to look for a phrase that's going to be repeated like, 'Do you see torpedo boats' and begin your efforts from there."
Not every fleet has Kamchatka among its vessels. ;)
However there was a German outpost somewhere in the desert that was daily sending something along the lines "nothing changed".
@@PobortzaPl sure it wasn't the German equivalent of SNAFU?
That actually did happen with the Long Range Desert Group where a listening post sent the same message every day saying "nothing happening" or such.
Lmao
There were times mines were dropped at specific locations just to generate messages saying “mines reported in grid square xxxx”
And here again I learn about another way the Poles *really* don't get enough credit for their contribution to the Allied war effort. Thank you for this excellent video and also for your definition of "brief."
bollocks ...
@Alan J The Poles were little more than a footnote, mostly about appeasement, in most history classes I have taken. It wasn't until I started digging deeper on my own that I started hearing about Polish resilience and ingenuity.
@@windwatcher460, Check out on Wikipedia the history of how the King of Poland, John III Sobieski, came to the rescue of Vienna on Sept. 11-12, 1683 and crushed the Muslim crusaders. The Poles also stood their ground when the filthy, commie/socialists of the Soviet Union tried to wipe out the Poles in the early 1920s.
Don't forget the Polish destroyer that charged the Bismark firing her guns and signalling "I am a Pole".
The Poles were "mad lads" in WW2 "repeat please, repeat please...... Oh godstruth."
If a Brit calls you a "mad lad" it is a sign of respect.
@Leonard squirrel how the hell you figure that one Hans?
"Sir, we've managed to crack the German's code! Turns out they were sending messages...in German!"
The bastards! The German language all by itself is almost a code. Read Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language" if you want a good chuckle.
Damn them, no wonder it came out to gibberish!!!!
You mean it's not pronounced DAMN IT?!?! On a more serious side, HANISPARK's comment is spot on for an early attempt to intercept Luftwaffe messages. I can't recall the specific details, but maybe this will spark a memory from someone else, there was an attempt to intercept the flyboys, ah, Flugjugend, and when they succeeded in finding the correct frequency, no on site understood German!
"Forgive me, Herr Blackadder. I have been neglecting my duties as a host. Please accept my appoloaggies." -- _Blackadder II,_ ep.6
Dear God...
This doesnt sound like an encryption machine.
Thats a torture instrument for mathematicians...
More like mathematician porn.........the rest of us it's torture
thats the point, and it is the reason why electronical computing machine are invented to aid in the computational.
@@bagustesa - and that at most universities, computer science is under the mathematics department.
Except that the mathematicians are too kinky to torture (this way).
No, this is the type of problem that is absolutely amazing to solve. Any sort of signals analysis/decryption is always fun to work with.
Sad ending of this story is that both Rejewski and Zygalski were pretty much not recognised or awarded untill late 70`s, when information about their involvement in breaking Enigma code was revealed. Zygalski remained in UK, teaching math in a provincial school while Rejewski returned to Poland and worked as a clerk.
Especially due to the cold war it was important to keep progress on code breaking a secret. Spies and cryptographers can never get the recognition the deserve while they live, because their information and methods stay valid for decades.
A general can have all the medals they want two days after the operation ended, because there is no secret information to keep at that time and there is value in the propaganda.
@@richardcline1337 Not really true, and there are often medals for everyone, including the foot soldier on the ground. Unless they worked in the oxymoronicly named military intelligence.
Polish communist government strongly downplayed Polish efforts on the "wrong" side of WWII. My great-grandfather suffered similar treatment, but because he was combative, patriotic and hated Communists and especially Russians, he spent most of 1950s and 1960s in jail or as forced labourer. He just cannot force himself to stay in England as many of his friends did (and my great-grandmother was waiting for him because she stayed in Czechoslovakia during the war).
General Maczek worked as a barman and General Sosabowski swept up in a shoe factory. Neither received a pension. British treatment of its Polish Ally after the war is a permanent stain on its honour and history.
Just listened to this with my Dad, who used to teach about Enigma. He said this was really well done!
Maybe he can come here
Good for you...listen to your dad
Because I'm Swedish, I want to remind about the Swedish mathematician Arne Beurling who on his own cracked the code of German telegraph line traffic between Germany and occupied Norway. In two weeks! This had nothing to do with Enigma, it was a kind of dedicated teleprompter encryption . And the dis-encryption machine he designed turned out to be simpler and faster than the German original.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arne_Beurling
Perhaps Germans aren't that good at math? Let's enumerate the notable german mathematicians! Leibnitz. Euler, of course, but he was a professor of Saint Petersburg in the 18th century. Gauss, the incredible genius of probability theory most useful for code breaking, but he was beaten up by his school teacher for solving his homework too quickly. Hilbert. Riemann. Klein. (I wish I understood half of what they accomplished). So the Germans DID have great mathematicians. Their military leaders just didn't understand how to put them to use. Maybe their math teachers didn't beat their behinds red enough in school.
The greatness of one is dragged down by the stupidity of many.
@xOr My parents were both beaten in school. My father said that he deserved it (because he for example from behind threw a firecracker under his teacher, making him jump and run in a funny way that lost him the air of authority) while my mother took offense because she felt that it was unjust and didn't fight back. Neither way, punishing the bad boy or the good girl, the tough or the soft, did any good.
It' does no good to beat children. Once beaten, they lose respect for it, because it wasn't so bad after all. The (tough boy) child understands that the beating is only symbolic with no intent of hurting them permanently physically. It is the THREAT of being beaten for the first time, that scary unknown, that works. Like nuclear war, a threat that only works as long as it remains an unfulfilled promise.
@@bjorntorlarsson im British, beating in schools happened here for 60ish years olds just rarely
Considering education background of Nazi leadership, I am not at all surprised. They employed many brilliant minds but when reading what they did to Albert Speer or Hjalmar Schacht, how could these lesser known people fare? It is that old Soviet problem of reality not really caring about your ideology. But you press on regardless.
Hilbert, who you mentioned, was once asked by the Nazi minister of education about the state of German mathematics, now that they had been "freed" of "Jewish mathematics." Hilbert supposedly replied that they had "destroyed" German mathematics.
An example: there are two main mathematical central databases for article reviews, known colloquially as zblatt and MathSciNet. "Zblatt" sprang from the journal "Zentralblatt fur Mathematik" (roughly "central newsletter for mathematics") founded in 1931 by, among others, Otto Neugebauer. MathSciNet sprang from the journal "Mathematical Reviews," founded in 1940 at Brown University by Otto Neugebauer, who had refused to swear a loyalty oath to Hitler, and had been expelled. Within 10 years, the language of mathematics had shifted irrevocably from German to English.
Great to see the Poles being given due credit!
Too true. I think the Poles have been underrated for ages.
I was surprised, usually brits like to pretend they did literally everything
Me: sabaton time!
Really, there should be a song
Agreed. This was focusing on the hard work that predated the mass production of british Bombes that made cracking the code a mechanical and (to be fair) not that hard task.
Figuring out the wheel configuration from just encrypted text is hard.
최KB Badass metal song about the matematicians, that would be something out of this world. :)
My mum worked at BP during the war, she said her biggest regret in her life was that she didn't get to tell her parents what she did during the war. She kept a secret for 25 years, and it drove her a wee bit nuts.
All-time great bridge player Oswald Jacoby did something other than play cards between 1941 and 1945. He never said what it was, but there are strong suspicions that he was deciphering Purple.
I have great respect for the Home-based warriors, doing the good work!
I had a high school teacher that worked there, long gone, she tolerated us. rest well.
@A Simple Mohave Desert Tortoise No, it would have been a charge under the official secrets act, not treason. Max ten years imprisonment. The secret was released early, when a movie "The Eagle has Landed" was done. We went to it with the parents, at the end was when mum told us where she'd worked during the war.
I understand that, it must have been kinda hard for her! By having to keep this a secret for so long, she also missed out on a fair bit of righteous praise and she had to keep a lot of interesting stories she must have had to herself!
I think there was one historical error: Rejewski and Zygalski were not at Bletchley Park, not even informed about its existence. They still worked on cryptoanalysis during the war but were kept out of ULTRA completely (reasons not totally clear but there are suspicions them being Poles had something to do with it). Their invaluable pioneering work was later downplayed and imo it took the French spilling the beans on the whole thing to get them the recognition they deserved.
The Communist Polish government dismissed the pre 1945 accomplishments of the non Communist Poles. The story of the Polish signals intel unit that drove the attack on the Enigma system 1924-1939 was not properly reconstructed until after 1990.
Amazingly, the Enigma machine was patented in 1918 by Arthur Scherbius, a German electrical engineer. It's first successful use was by the German Army in the late 1920's as a method to communicate among German manufacturers. The Germans were forbidden to rearm under the Versailles Treaty, and Enigma offered an ideal way to communicate between the Army and manufacturers that were illegally building tanks. Even though the encoded text was transmitted over normal shortwave frequencies, it was assumed the that massive number of key combinations would make it impossible for the Allies to know what the resurgent German Army was up to. The first successful attempts to break the Enigma code wasn't done by, as might be expected, the British or the Americans, but by the Poles, starting in the mid 30's. The amazing math described by Drach gave the Poles what they needed for their "Bomba", the first brute force machine to decode Enigma messages. It was the first of many built by the British and Americans.
I wish that I'd seen your comment before wasting 53 minutes 56 seconds of my life, or indeed two visits to Bletchley. The machine was also used as a business machine to encrypt financial transactions, early versions could simply be bought. The Poles also intercepted a machine intended for use by the German embassy in Warsaw which helped.
If you think Marian Rejewski was smart have a look at what Bill Tutt managed without ever seeing a Lorenz machine, known as Hitler's Blackberry.
Seeing as the Poles were in a position, geographicly speaking, to be the next target in Europe, I'd say they had more incentive than most everyone else.
@@photoisca7386 I'm pretty sure you have more to contribute to this topic than I do with the amount of time you spent in research and your visits to Bletchley Park. I'd give my eye teeth to go there. Unfortunately, living across the pond and reaching the age where overseas travel has gotten increasingly difficult, it's not something that's going to happen. Continue to take advantage of all the things that are available to you there.
@@its1110 Indeed, although the Poles had a secondary driver for trying to decrypt the Enigma output. They were hoping to come up with their own version of Enigma that the Germans couldn't read, and starting with the existing version of Enigma gave them a start.
Yes, once upon a time, commercial travellers would communicate via telegraph/telegram and they would use commercial codes.
Last time I was this early Enigma only had three wheels
Finally one of these that was actually funny and relevant(ish). Good work.
This comment always gets a lot of thumbs up but I don't get it.
It must be funny because everybody is likes it but I am missing it.
@@1joshjosh1 the first machines had three dials and later moved to four dials to increase security.
@@lycossurfer8851
I have seen that last time I've been this early joke before but this time it makes sense.
🤣
I love to see credit given to polish mathematicians, few people in the west were aware of their pioneer work on enigma. While Poland contributed in the field with armed forces in exile and later, soviet-aligned armies raised at end of war, the gift of knowledge about enigma in summer 1939 was probably biggest contribution to allied cause.
Yes but it was also a lot of luck. French has handed manuals and other materials to Polish just because they've fought they are completely useless. Polish were working in hiding till summer 1939 showing to French and British working machine and a bomb just few weeks before the war.
One single dislike. Admiral Doenitz doesn't like this one.
Here's an ö for you to include in the name to spell it correctly.
@@benbaselet2026
You are just trying to hoard all of the 'e's... and plain 'o's.
Pentti Kantanen OK... Admiral Dönuts. Thx!
@@MendTheWorld
I was going to ask if he was a Berliner or the kind with a hole. I see he was actually born in Berlin... and was not shot. So...
@@its1110 Well typos will occur but its good to have the pompous and conceited to lend a hand with handy coments.
So, I'm a cyber security engineer at a US Government National Lab - and I'm working to get conference rooms here named after some of the less known cryptologists from WW1 and 2. Ewing of Room 40 is on my list, and now, so is Rejewski! (We already have a Turing room). :)
Add Bernhard Riemann to the list. Not really a cryptologist but his work is instrumental in the field.
The only sad thing there is he qualifies as "lesser known". As I learn more and more about his work that's unfortunate.
@@wingracer1614 Bernhard Reimann is always worth a mention! So many truly brilliant mathematicians that are not well known sadly.
Sir Tommy Flowers
Have you a conference room named the Ewing Room now? The subtitle of my book actually ends, Exploratory Knack
In this context, also Arne Buerling should be mentioned. He single handed, in two weeks time, with pen and paper only, broke the the German codes in 1940. This code was even harder to brake than the Enigma. (Siemens Halske T 52 Geheimfernschreiber). Thousands of German messages were decrypted and operation Barbarossa was known well before it happened. Actually, Swedish diplomats warned Joseph Stalin about the operation but he simply did not believe it. As far as I know, Brittish intelligence was informed that we also had cracked the codes.
Fun fact is that Buerling later inherited Albert Einsteins office at Princeton.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arne_Beurling
This machine was also protected since it was a teletext machine, they never sent a single of the encoded messages over radio, it was all on wire and in German controlled areas. Except for neutral (at the beginning of the war slightly pro-German) Sweden. And we (well, Arne at least) robbed them of their secrets.
Of course, it was still impossible to intercept and decode traffic that did not go to or from Norway.
Rejewski discovered how military Enigma worked using not only power of math, but he also had a commercial version of Enigma at hand, and code book of Enigma settings for two months (September and October 1932) - which was provided by French intelligence.
Supposedly, with enough brain power available, it is possible to break any code system without ever seeing the plaintext or having any idea how the machine works. Fish/Tunny may have been broken this way. The thought of it hurts my brain. It needs to lie down and rest now.
@@philperry4699 it is at least my understanding that sure brain power not only broke purple, the Japanese diplo codes, but allowed the Americans to reverse engineer the device and make their own. Astonishingly of the IIRC 6 purple machines available to the Anglo Americans on December 7 was in Singapore and wasn't properly disposed off before Singapore fell. The Japanese either never found it or never grasped the significance of it.
I'm very glad you noted the vast head start the Poles and French gave the British code breakers. So many of people on the internet would like us to believe the myth that it was an all British show.
Yes and more. The internet and popular movies etc take credit away from the great many who were involved and in many cases give it to some who did less or very little.
BTW: The main reason that so many US ships were sunk early on was because the US navy guy absolutely refused to take the advice and hard won knowledge about how not to get sunk from the british.
@@kensmith5694; for some reason US Admiral King, (the "US Navy guy"), had a dislike for everything British, and his refusal to listen to anything the Royal Navy had to say cost a lot of ships and lives early in the war.
@@kensmith5694 The word you're looking for here is "convoys". Our merchant ships operating on the Atlantic coast continued to travel singly and without escort for months and the U-Boats found them easy picking.
@@donbaccus2074 Not to mention shore towns and cities refusing to black out their lights, leaving ships silhouetted against the shore glow.
It was a little more complex than King being a Jerk who didn't respect British advise.
Early on, he didn't have the assets to protect convoys on the US East Coast so he allowed Single Ships to sail and be attacked by U-Boats vs Several Ships being grouped in Convoys to be attacked by one or more U-Boats.
Initially he used his limited assets to escort Troop Carriers to Halifax to be formed into convoys and escorted by Canada/Britain to the UK.
In early 1942, his only priority was protecting Troop Ships.
He then began to escort War Supplies in early/mid spring '42 with priority on Oil/Av-Gas to Britain.
When he had more assets, he began convoy ops on the East Coast in late spring '42 and later in the Gulf/Caribbean.
Without assets to protect East Coast convoys, losses would have been much higher within those convoys than the losses of non-escorted/non-convoyed shipping. Hence, no coastal convoys in early 1942.
Historians don't give King the credit he deserves. He did what had to be done with the resources he had.
Also, King was not directly commanding East Coast ops. That was then Vice Admiral Andrews who had to make the hard day-by-day decisions to get as much cargo as possible to Halifax knowing that many ships and lives would be lost in the process.
The only other possible decision, in the early months of '42, was to stop all shipping on the US East Coast. That would have been Britain's Death Knell.
Also, King had more pressing needs in the Pacific than the loss of Merchant shipping/lives on the US East Coast. There was the possibility of a Pearl Harbor type attack on the West Coast which was very real until the Battle of Midway.
Always good to see that photo of Heinz Guderian looking impressively martial in his command vehicle, which the Germans carelessly published for publicity purposes in 1940.
Two things you didn't mention:
1. The tendency of German units to sign their messages 'Heil Hitler'; even better for a starting guess than 'An '.
2. Garbo (Juan Pujol García): a Spaniard who detested the Nazis, who set up an entirely imaginary spy network to feed them misinformation, and who was eventually, after a couple of rebuffs, hired by MI6 to expand his activities in the UK.
_It is a lot easier to decrypt a message if you have both written and sent it, and then intercepted the Enigma retransmission of the identical text._
Garbo had the rare distinction of being awarded both an Iron Cross 2nd Class and an MBE.
One of Garbo's fictional agents unfortunately died. The Nazis swarded his equally fictional widow a pension, which MI6 gratefully paid into their own bank account, thus reducing the burden on the British taxpayer.
Cheeky! I approve!
Drach (Spongebob): “Well, it's no secret that the best thing about a secret is secretly telling someone your secret, thereby secretly adding another secret to their secret collection of secrets, secretly.”
Me: Patrick’s Reaction.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : He who would keep a secret must keep it a secret that he hath a secret to keep.
Marian Adam Rejewski, once I learned who he was and what he had done, absolutely made me mentally eat every Pollack joke I had ever told. Without salt or pepper but it was served with an entire Humble Pie!
Here! Have a 2nd serving by reading about Nicolaus Copernicus (the Polish guy credited with figuring out how the Solar System works.)
Being 'exceptional' has absolutely nothing to do with our artificial pigeonholes of nationality, race, gender, etc...
If you've still got room for more, try Marie Curie... Two Nobel prizes; one in Physics, one in Chemistry...
@@rustycherkas8229 plus she raised another Noblist
I have just seen the video. Brilliant work for sure, especially the brain melting part showing how complicated the machines to code were and how insane the work to decode was.
When it comes to the Poles there are some factors to consider, some of them less important, some more:
1. A number of Poles who lived in the part grabbed by Prussia in 1792 (and again in 1815) during the 1st WW worked in communication units of the German Imperial Army, one of several reasons was no local accent. German was a foreign language to them so no unnecessary and disrupting changes to the German language.
2. Poles managed to break Red Army's codes in 1920 to such a degree they were capable to read Soviet messages faster than the units of the Red Army. This also allowed them to see through lies and deception while Red Army was gathering troops and heavy artillery in early 1920. Ironically this also worked once for the Red Army's favour because March-April offensive of Polish-Ukrainian troops was timed so that Soviet northern front in Belarus was still not ready to react to the events in Ukraine, but Tukhachevsky launched an offensive too early, in May 1920 which failed but achieved something - forced Poles to react and deprived their army in Ukraine of some key units so it was unable to stop Soviet Horse Army. It was rough for the Poles for the entire June and July duo to the fact, but again in August 1920 and September/October helped them gaining victory in this war.
3. Poles ran rather close cooperation with several neighbouring states against the Soviets and one particular country much, much further away i.e. Japan. Cooperation with Japan included decoding Soviet codes but not only that. Cooperation with Japan is actually older than the reborn Polish state - started in 1905 earlier, mainly between Polish socialists of J.Piłsudski and Japanese intelligence services - obviously against Russia.
It is a long and complicated subject so I'll stop here. There was even rather stunning proposal from Japan for Poland to buy 11 light cruisers from this country... in 1932 if I am not mistaken.
Thanks again for the video!
*reads title* I see what you did there...
Haven't even watched it yet, saved for later, and that's a terrible pun...
If you use the word in its various meanings in English, you enjoy the gag that just keeps giving..... Some of it is very dark humour of course.
@@davidbrennan660
... just... ... SMH...
Actually, there were three Polish mathematicians in a cryptography team: Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki.
@joanne chon Well, as far I know he was studying mathematics (1929 - Master degree on philosophy(all matematicians got this degree) and mathematics).
It looks as though those names have been encrypted - Oh, wait... they're Polish.....
@@herseem "sir, we've done everything and can't decode this!"
"have you checked if its in polish"
"ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh..."
@joanne chon haha! Statistics is one of those things that can be critically important and revealing, or done badly and be obfuscating. As the famous quote goes, "there are lies, Damn lies, and statistics". But statistics are also helpful in cryptography in narrowing down the number of guesses
Until the intro of the "stepper" mechanism, it wouldn't make any difference how many rotors there were. It would operate like a black box, where the letter "A" would always translate to the same output letter (except for "A" itself), regardless of how many interim transformation steps were executed. Likewise for "B", etc.
That's what I was thinking and when he got on to the "extra features" I realised that they were necessary.
Good point.
A little off-topic, don't you think? Nevertheless, I find it ironic that you're complaining about "CZcams THE DESTROYER OF FREESPEECH" on... CZcams.
@@mimikal7548 Yeah, they weren't really extra. The machine was designed that way from the beginning. Otherwise there was no reason for them to be wheels on an axle. They are only extra in the sense of the discussion. They are additional sources of complexity in a mathematical sense, but not added on parts of the machine. They are integral to the design and the whole reason the machine was manufactured. To make that process easier.
The plugboard _was_ actually added afterwards. That was a military addition to the commercial version.
I've been fascinated by the Enigma story for many years. I can honestly say I learnt more in this video than I have from the majority of books or documentatries I have read or watched on the subject in the last 40 years! Great work.
Episode 6 of the BBC's "The Secret War", titled "Still Secret" (1977), gives a good look at BP, Enigma/Ultra, and Fish/Tunny. Check it out if you haven't already done so. One of the people interviewed, Gordon Welshman, later wrote a book on Signal Traffic Analysis at BP that spilled too many secrets, and got in deep trouble.
The machines the ladies are using at 32:15 are the british Typex encrypting / decrypting machines, which is what my dad was using to re-transmit Enigma signals from the front lines back to blighty. He only told me three years before he died at the age of 93.
Marian Rejewski was indeed a genius - but besides his mind work, which remains to be admired, there was one very physical incident in 1928 that helped the Poles to find out what Enigma is; because they would intercept a military Enigma in the post customs when it was on its way from Germany to the German embassy in Warsaw. Tadeusz Lisicki reported this in Brian Johnson's book The Secret War in 1978 (a tv series was made later of it as well).
Over one weekend while the Polish customs office was closed, the German Enigma was in the hands of the Polish military intelligence service. During that time it was studied in all details, photographed, and repacked to be sent to the German embassy the next monday, without any visible traces what happened, of course. With that information, BS4 started the Polish decyphering of the Enigma until 1939. When the Germans invaded Poland, the Poles destroyed any whatsoever evidence about what they knew or could do. As far as we know today, the Germans did not assume that Enigma has been cracked a long time ago, and they continued to use it everywhere.
How did the Poles know that there was an Enigma on its way in 1928? According to Johnson's book/Lisicki: because the German official who got anxious to get "that packet" out ASAP, was making the Poles suspicious, just because he behaved so nervously; so that packet must be very - uhm - important ...
This indicent was also reported by the Polish-German historian Janusz Piekalkiewicz in his last book in 1988, referring again to Lisicki; only that it happened in January 1929.
Given the fact that the successful Enigma decryption was kept secret until 1974, it becomes understandable why all these small nice details remain unreported in most other books.
Nervous German gives the game away! Awesome
If "The Secret War" was the basis for the BBC series of the same name, it must have been published in the 1974-1976 range. The BBC series was copyright 1976 and 1977. "The Ultra Secret" was published around 1974 (the series might have already been in the works when Enigma/Ultra was revealed, and a last episode added on to cover it).
plus they had the commercially available enigmas that were on the market before the germans modified them for military and naval use
Watched this with my morning coffee. The brain was caught unawares and had no time to flee. Wonderful history!
I get a feeling that during a Boogaloo, Drach would be one of the first people to grab a cricket bat and start doing work.
Anyway fantastic video sir, videos like this are one way that your channel is different and better then others.
When I was a kid/teenager I got a code book in the mail and I had fun trying out all the different codes and ciphers in the book.
Easily the best video on youtube on the Enigma Macine out there. Also massive credit to the poles for the raw brainpower to completely reconstruct the Enigma machine with a few lines of encoded text and a single relation between four letters. I can't fathom something like this on this scale and level today, to make an enigma machine of modern times and then let the best mathematical minds of today try to make a crack at it by hand.
I don't think the Polish cryptographers typically get enough credit for the work they did both pre-war and during the war. It was a welcome change to have them mentioned more fully here. You gave the French cryptographers a fair mention too, so well done. Credit where it is due.
One thing which won't lessen any effort on Marian Rejewski: One early Encryption Device similar to the enigma was sold to the poles. Together with the French recovered Instruction Manual of the Enigma they knew the basic principels BUT Marian Rejewski got all the wirings of the first three Cylinders and constructed the Bomba to break the Enigma. He is a real genius. I am German and studied Computer Science and of Course in Cryptographics we had a full lection on the Enigma and how it was broken.
Yes. Enigma was actually a commercially sold machine, which is why it had such a showy name, and rotor machines were a common class of encryption devices, but the Germans made many changes to their Enigma machines, such as adding the plug board, more rotors, and changing around most of the internal wiring.
Technically, the bomb was not Rejewski's idea. It simpler version was designed and built by engineer employed in Cipher Bureau. What Rejewski did was ANALYTICAL way to formalize and derive internal wiring of machine.
Uncle Drach is improving his Polish. As a Pole I approve this :)
@ger du Sounds like next generation of Gestapo,'s English from her Flick manual =)
ger du
I bet on Finnish :)
The public memorial to Marian Rejewski was really well done. Mankind at its finest. [Nothing defines us more than brute brainpower. Ergo: the only valid reason to have kids is to produce another fully-enabled mind]
Drach explaining the successive levels of encryption and randomisation in the Enigma: "Aber warten sie, es gibt noch mehr!"
In coin flipping you forgot the edge. "Imagine the honor if I had won." The reliance on Ultra came back to bite us from time to time, most especially when the Army was pushed back into Germany itself and started using the local telephone network for messages. This led to the surprise of Watch on the Rhine.
"brain melting out my ear in a desperate attempt to flee from what I'm trying to do to it", describes just to trying to wake up some times, lol.
Great vid Drach and crew. B)
Rejewski was not allowed into BP because of secrecy. Most people in BP didn’t know they work on foundation made by Rejewski. After returning to Soviet occupied Poland he was under surveillance. His work was declassified in 1973 and in 1978 he got officers cross of Order of Polonia Restituta. No British or Allies medals.
That's a travesty.
He should get retroactive medals!
Drachinifel. Very true. At least in a free Poland he will get his full recognition now.
Polish professors at university of Warsaw back engineered. German radio transmission and without seeing a machine built one. And it was brought to Bletchley park in England as a basis for further development
Well, I couldn't sleep anyway, so now I have Drach and an Enigma machine to lull me to sleep, I hope.
You'll need an Enigma machine to interpret your dreams.
Just start counting the combinations
@@VersusARCH that sleep might as well be eternal
Great job Drach. Your technical/engineering background combined with your natural presentation skills, gives you an edge in these types of videos for the rest of us that don't have the natural acumen.
The Strowger switch is the first commercially successful electromechanical stepping switch telephone exchange system. It was developed by the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company founded in 1891 by Almon Brown Strowger. Because of its operational characteristics it is also known as a step-by-step (SXS) switch.
I like how the British told no one about cracking Enigma until 30 years after the end of WW2. My guess is this is because Russia and other countries were getting examples of Enigma after the war and a lot of them made their own versions after the war. The Soviets used a ten rotor system called Fialka. By "forgetting" to tell the Soviets that they could crack rotor machines, the British would have been able to read Soviet traffic well into the 1970s. My guess is that Enigma became public after the Soviets went away from rotor machines.
Also, I am guessing that Huff Duff (High frequency radio direction finding) was mainly used as a cover for the fact that the British had actually cracked the naval enigma.
And finally, why did the Navy use a four rotor system when everyone else used a three rotor system? It is because they did not trust the Army encryption methods and encryption discipline after their experiences with the Army in WW1. And quite right they were too.
Supposedly for several decades the UK was selling a slightly-improved Engima to allies and friendly countries as an "unbreakable" cipher system. All information about Enigma and its cracking was suppressed.
On the other hand before the fall of France neither the UK nor France was willing to give the other country's code-breakers one of their own encryption machines. So there was a while where the cryptoanalysis groups in the 2 countries, who were coordinating their efforts against the Germans, communicated with each other using Enigma encryption because the German machines were the only device they had in common.
_"By "forgetting" to tell the Soviets that they could crack rotor machines, the British would have been able to read Soviet traffic well into the 1970s."_
Not all rotor machines are created equal. That is, just because you can break one does not mean that you can break them all. Enigma was broken because of certain weaknesses of the machine, and because of defective procedures. Without those weaknesses, and without the bad procedures, it would not have been broken.
@@michaelsommers2356 Indeed not all rotor machines were created equal. The Bombes were used to decypher Enigma traffic and Colossus was used to decypher Tunny traffic. The later was a ten rotor machine that had different weaknesses than standard Enigma machines. The British cracked the Lorentz cypher without ever seeing a cypher machine. But, they learned on these and then could extend their technique to more general cases. Thanks to work of the Poles and their wartime experience, Bletchly Park was years ahead of anyone else in cracking Enigma based cyphers.
@@spacecadet35 _"Indeed not all rotor machines were created equal."_
You don't seem to have grasped my point, which was that breaking one did not automatically enable breaking another.
_"[Lorenz] was a ten rotor machine ..."_
No, it wasn't. It didn't use rotors, but wheels that were similar to the wheels used in the Hagelin machine. It also had 12 of them, not ten. Ten were for enciphering, while the other two controlled the stepping of one set of five enciphering wheels.
_"The British cracked the Lorentz cypher without ever seeing a cypher machine."_
Friedman and his colleagues cracked the Japanese PURPLE machine without ever seeing one, and it operated on completely different principles.
_"Bletchly Park was years ahead of anyone else in cracking Enigma based cyphers."_
Partly because for a long time they refused to share anything with the US. It was their baby, and no one else was going to play with it but them---until it became clear that they couldn't handle the job by themselves.
Hurrah for the polish!
I just downloaded the "enigma simulator" app on my phone thanks to this video. Now I can send my friends, "Be sure to drink more Ovaltine."
Admiral Karl Donitz believed the Kriegsmarine Enigma cipher was absolutely secure. As losses went up it became obvious Allied success against German Submarines were not just luck coupled with tactics. To ensure loyalty officers were screened and sent on vacation to see if anything could be found or inferred. Ultimately the loyalty checks were fruitless and the puzzle remained unsolved.
Cryptographers - Yes we're paranoid but are we paranoid enough?
The US Navy was just as flabbergasted to learn the Russians had compromised its crypto systems through the mid 80s. The Maritime Patrol community used to report incidents where it appeared that the Soviers were attempting to sync up with US crypto gear but passed it off as a trial and error attempt at breaking into the system, I am sure other warfare branches experienced the same phenomenon. Then John Walker got caught.
I came here expecting and nice interesting description of a ship or class of ships and now my brain is hiding in the closet whimpering. Thanks a lot, Drach! :)
The number of "stucker" wires could only be 13 maximum, as each wire connected a pair of the 26 possible letters...so there could never be 15 plug wires.
Beyond those you mentioned, there were some other procedural flaws. One rather humorous one was that there was a suggestion that a nonsense word be added to the beginning of the message to improve security...so that they weren't all starting with, for example, "weather report" (or "ANX" as you mentioned.) "Sonnenschein" (Sunshine) was given as an example of such a nonsense word. So it turned out that a huge number of messages literally started with the word "Sonnenschein". A huge number of messages also ended with the words "Heil Hitler". Because of the A=/=A flaw, it was pretty easy to test the cypher text to see if the suspected plain text was indeed in the message.
I just got 97% on my Anthropology 250 final. This isn't relevant at all to the video, but I'm happy and wanted to share.
Congrats!
polygondwanaland I saved 15 percent on GEICO insurance
Just as long as you watched this video all through as well
Canadian Tire thanks you.
Always nice to see someone put in the efford. Good for your character. Good Boy!
German coded messages: Advanced mechanical computer which requires the concentrated effort of nations to crack.
American coded messages: Lets just find people who speak obscure languages.
It was more than just the choice of a rare language, it was a code built in that language that was incomprehensible to other speakers of the language.
But these were available in America. The Brits didn't have them; even Scots Gaelic was too widely understood.
@@bertrandlechat4330 Actually there was some limited use of Welsh and a plan to use it for the RAF that fell through in the end but not quite true to say they didn't have them.
Brilliant. Drach, you went above and beyond in preparing this episode and as always it was both fascinating and balanced. So well done.
Terrific. I'm not going to lie, I am now going to watch it second time to get everything right. There's maybe third coming, idk.
One thing I can guarantee, as my polished senses are tingling:
You repeat 'polish' or 'Pole' so many times, that I suppose 90%+ of said folks love you now.
Some call it otherwise, I prefer trauma, but hell of a lot of people I know are bitter that polish contribution to cracking Enigma was ignored and remain largely unknown. I'm not trying to point fingers, just explanation why Drachnifel may see some polish fandom growing ;)
Great Job.
PS Video about allied navies from occupied countries, specifically part about ORP Piorun ("Thunder") - i know people that would sing songs praising you for exposing Piorun's fighting spirit like you did, sir.
Check Lazerpig's video on that xD
If I remember this correctly, it's been a while since I read anything on Enigma and the like, the Germans also really shot themselves in the foot in a few areas not mentioned.
The big one was that they wouldn't allow a rotor to remain in the same place for two consecutive days. So you could have, in a four rotor configuration 2-4-6-8, you couldn't then also have 1-2-3-8, as eight is repeated.
They didn't manage it well or understand the end implication of their choices.
They don't seem to have worked very seriously, by using an independent 'black box' cracking team, at objectively investigating the system's vulnerabilities. They mainly just used the system w/o understanding it.
Classic "security through obscurity". i.e. A big dose of wishful thinking.
Narrow-minded totalitarian thinking can systematically blind one to their own limitations... questioning not being allowed. We're likely lucky that the Nazis did not have or value many intellectuals in their ranks of power. A bit of Dunning-Kruger Effect, perhaps?
Funny,
Much of the same mistakes from WWI.....
Having 20-umpteen possible combinations doesn't help all that much when you deliberately remove 19-umpteen of them.
Rather reminds me of MicroSoft's approach to passwords in their early networked OSes. 8-bit ASCII characters... but always had the most significant bit zeroed... and other limitations on the character-set. Knowing it was a password being decrypted, that gave significant clues in the breaking of the encryption. Totally amateur move.
They can be forgiven, to some extent. The work of Claude Shannon was still obscure at the time.
There is an optimal number of plugs for the plug board, I think it is 7 or so. When you add more plugs you actually decrease the number of combinations.
But then again, once you have a crib and mass produced bombes to allow for parallell testing of all the 1680 possible rotor combinations in parallell (which requires bombs with 4 rotors for each of the letters of the crib, which was typically 4-6 letters) the substitution cipher of the plugboard just adds a minute or two to the decoding.
My mum, June Hopewell, was a Wren who used to reset the , and I quote her " giant bobbins on these Heath Robinson machines". She never told Dad, let alone us, until they relaxed the Secrecy Laws around the 70's(?). When she did we weren't at all interested, as it sounded like a really boring job. So we never found out anything more. She passed away in 97.
She was a mathematical genius so we will never know if she helped in decryption or just operated the bombes. If anyone has any info or knew her I would be very grateful.
Great video. I thought it to be a lot more easy to follow than the complex battle ship engineering issues. Well done.
Tl;dr enigma is a German code making machine 😜
Oh and Benaditch cumberbatch broke it with no help from the polish or others and Matthew McConaughey and other Americans bravely got the first naval enigma machine too....
Hollywood would have left you with (i'll be polite)Egg on your face
It was the RN that captured the naval enigma. The americans had nothing to do with it, thats a hollywood fiction
@@jameshuggins17 You'll note he credited actors who can not have been involved unless they either have a time machine or are secretly immortals. And having been on the same set with no decapitations I think we can safely rule out the latter. And if Hollywood had a time machine surely their medieval props wouldn't be so shit.
@@jameshuggins17 I was being sarcastic
@@jameshuggins17 R/wooosh
Great summary of an incredibly complex topic/story Drach.
I love that these are “five minute guides” yet just about every video in this series is between half an hour and an hour
I am wearing today a G.Gerlach Enigma watch dedicated to Marian Rejewski and fellow mathematician-cryptologists Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski the three most under appreciated heroes of WW2. Along with Arne Beurling most famous for single-handedly deciphering an early version of the German cipher machine Siemens and Halske T52 in a matter of two weeks during 1940, using only pen and paper. This machine's cipher is generally considered to be more complicated than that of more famous Enigma machine.
Sometimes on the longer videos, I have to back out of full screen to make sure that I thumbs upped your video... several times. keep up the excellent work and thank you for your hard work and commitment. I don't know what you make from these videos, but you deserve much more.
The engineers inventing and improving enigma must have really been annoyed by these clueless operators continuously sabotaging their efforts.
the absolute least secure part of any system is the human operating it. that is still true today. we are gullible, stupid creatures.
A great video on a crucial part of ww2 history. Perhaps a follow up on the other German machine used and broken without the teams at bletchley park seeing a physical device until after the war, I for the life of me can't remember what it was called!
Great channel and history videos, about a subject that falls outside my usual interest/knowledge of military aviation. Always good to learn new history!
I thought an intact enigma machine was captured along with code books off a uboat the was disabled but not scuttled after the crew abandoned ship. I'm not sure why that wasn't mentioned in the video.
@@troy2478 that's enigma, it wasn't used by the German high command, i still can't remember what it was called, began with v i think. The naval enigma though was captured by the British from a U-boat before it could be scuttled. It was crucial as the naval version having the extra roter hadn't been cracked at that point.
A Pole approved video ;)
This is by far the best video on Enigma I've ever seen,so good to have it explained in layman's terms! just excellent, thank you
For your information, "bombe" was the name of a certain Polish candy, which is why the name was chosen.
I thought it translated as 'pump'...pump in code, comes out clear?
The stepper is really what makes Enigma challenging. If you have a simple substitution, it doesn't matter how many transforms you do, if by the end, the L maps to A, I only have to figure out 26 mappings, not billions and billions of steps. And because the language being used is known, it's patterns and character distribution is known. Knowing that the only letters that are common together are L, M, T, S, P, F, N, M, C, means that every double pair that occurs can be shifted and tested. This manner of code breaking is a brute force method but doesn't care how many transforms you have done. As long as L maps to A at the end of the day, it's trivial to break. The steppers toss all that out the window. Now, L can be any letter and double occurrences lose all meaning and importance. Four Ls in a row could be any combination of letters as each one is not immediately dependent on the previous.
Loved it, thank you so much for your time making this video.
Wow! What a great video. Thank you.
My wife and I watched the movie about Turing and knew it missed and flat got wrong things.
I sent her the link so she can watch this as well.
Thanks!!! this is pretty much the most comprehensive and clear explanation of the machine that I have ever seen (heard)
Superb presentation. Thank you sir.
Very well done. Good research. I really liked your depth that you went into. 👍🏻
Biogram tables beloved of the KM were a knotty problem that needed “pinches” early in the war, nice video.
Thank you sir!
One interesting fact that I read elsewhere was that
A) the enigma was actually invented before WW II as a device to secure bank and economical as well as political information when sent via Telegraph..... cause every operator sending e.g. a cable to somebody at a distant branch of your bank/company/... was able to listen in.
B) the Polish didn’t trust germany and started spying on German military communications pretty early on after WW I as in overhearing the Germans maneuvers initially in clear and then working on the subject as soon as germany started using encryption...
Thank you for this video! What an incredible amount of research!!
Drach you the man!
Love your stuff one of the best channels ever
And the day is great !
Thank you Drach :)
Fantastic video most comprehensive explanation of Enigma I've ever watched.
Saw the title in the 'youtube recommends' and thought, great, another moron video with just half the facts trying to be popular by tackling something too complex for them... then I saw it was Drach. HOLD ON. Clicked it, watched it, loved it. Thanks for great content, as usual.
Also thanks for restoring a bit of my faith in the internet... it does have good stuff from time to time. Turns out you just need to watch the right channels.
Having worked in this at one point in my time in the U.S.D.O.D.
Something I orginally tried to avoid.....
Then really enjoying(I must have a sadistic attitude about headaches)
That was by far the best explanation of the enigma code I have ever heard. To achieve it in under an hour is incredible. Superb video!
LOVED this video! Thank you so much!
You are a genius yourself for being able to simplify this, Drach. Thank you.
How do you Flash, "I am a Pole" using the 4 Rotor Enigma?
Love the Title, well played words!
If you thought Enigma was complicated, look up the Lorenz system.
And the CRM114 was even more complicated.
@@stalkinghorse883 - Unfortunately, it was broken when an important diplomatic meeting was postponed.
Lorenz was simpler it is a modulo 2 binary addition of a pseudo random sequence. You cracked it by adding together two message texts sent with the same settings which removes the pseudorandom stream and leaves to convoluted German texts the deconvolution is a room 40 type problem. This is even easier if they are the same message which given the mechanical fragility of the system seems to have happened more regularly than you might think. The key difficulty is adding the two sequences together accurately and in step without error and that needs a proper computer rather than an electromechanical machine with hardware embedded algorithms
@@davidwright7193 The enigma is also a simple machine in that respect.
They are both rotor machines, but the Enigma only has 26 letter wheels,. while the Lorenz machine has three different wheels that all turn at every bit (or letter, not sure which).
Without operator errors like repeating a message with the same settings the Lorenz would have been safe.
One other thing the Kreigsmarine did operationally to complicate the process was each area of operation (eg./ North Atlantic, Caribbean, Baltic) would have their own 'code of the day'.
So did the other services. Each operational area using its own cipher settings was a "network". They had to be individually broken at BP.
Thank you for this great video!
WHO WOULD WIN?
The Worlds most complex encryption machine
OR
One madlad pole high off kielbasa and vodka?
The French helped him recover the manual and he had a machine right by him
Okay this guy that built the machine from scratch, I don't know how to say his name properly, key and Einstein would probably have some great philosophical discussions. Yes Bank?
I applaud this diversion. A fascinating topic, related to naval operations, with significant historical effects.
I really enjoyed this video. Thank you
Amazing presentation thanks, this must have been much much more difficult to put together than any of the ship videos. It is also amazing to see what can be achieved with an almost limitless amount of money combined with the best minds of several countries.
what!! Your telling me the film U571 wasn’t accurate and it wasn’t all thanks to the good old US of A! I am shocked
U571 actually describes class of events that were quite popular - British indeed recovered one enigma and codebooks from submarine, and also they were setting up traps on supply ships. This was larger more concentrated effrot.
Marian Rejewski - after war worked as humble accountant. He kept in total secret his war and pre war activity, to avoid being arrested and killed like other Polish wart heroes. He broke silence in 1967.
Henryk Zygalski - never returned Poland. After war remained in exile, worked at University of Surrey as lecturer. Until hes death he wasn't credited for his wartime achievements.
Jerzy Rozycki - Różycki and Zygalski likewise worked at ongoing development of methods and equipment to exploit Enigma decryption as a source of intelligence. Różycki invented the "clock" method, which sometimes made it possible to determine which of the machine's rotors was at the far right, that is, in the position where the rotor always revolved at every depression of a key.
He died in 1942 (pasnger ship Lamoricière).
Long after war all the achievement of polish cytologist were ether kept in silence or discredited. Even quite modern made films (i'm talking about discovery channel) about enigma are not mentioning about those three polish mathematicians.
A monument in Poznan to memorize the names that layed a fundament for breaking down nazi power:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_R%C3%B3%C5%BCycki#/media/File:Polish_cryptologists_breaking_Enigma_ciphers_monument_01.JPG
My brain went up in flames around 35:00~. I'm rather proud of myself.
There's a popular version of all this cryptography stuff in Neil Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon". Highly recommend it for reading.
Zoran Ocokoljic awesome book!!!
One of my all time favorites.
It's very odd but the poles lost but they won sewing the seed of the Germans destruction by their work on enigma. The most destructive thing that cased the most damage to the German war effort with the poles development of the enigma machine
The Polish navy and Polish pilots in the RAF also pitched in. The RAF had few experienced pilots at the start of the war. The polish pilots had lots of experience and helped not only as pilots, but also training new RAF pilots.
Great video, thanks for the upload👍😎