[Spooks] Online Amateurs Crack Nazi Codes

[Al Fansome]

"Online Amateurs Crack Nazi Codes"
BBC News (03/02/06); Blenford, Adam

Software powered by grid computing has cracked one of the German ciphers
from World War II that stumped both Allied code breakers during the war and
cryptography enthusiasts since the publication of the ciphers in 1995.
Encoded in 1942 by an updated German Enigma machine, encrypted German
ciphers led to major Allied losses in the North Atlantic.  Stefan Krah, a
German violinist with a yen for open-source software and cryptography,
began the renewed quest to crack the German codes out of "basic human
curiosity," despite their relative lack of historical significance.
Drawing on the years of work by veteran amateur cryptographers, Krah wrote
a code-breaking program that he published on the Internet, drawing the
interest of around 45 users who volunteered their machines for the project.
The project now runs on 2,500 independent machines.  It took just over a
month to decode the first of the three ciphers, in which a German submarine
reported that it was submerging and relayed the last recorded enemy
position.  The Enigma machine employed an array of rotors and electrical
contents to uniquely encode messages, confounding the celebrated Allied
cryptographers at Bletchley Park in the UK.  The transmissions were
scrambled further as plugboards swapped pairs of letters as the message was
being encoded.  Krah's software combines algorithms with raw computing
power to reproduce the possibilities of the plugboard swaps, while
systematically wading through the rotor setting combinations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4763854.stm