Cryptanalysis of the Enigma
SkyDogCon 2012

 Bob Weiss & Benjamin Gatti

Were Allen Turing to have survived to the present; he would have access to the most powerful computers and the liberty to choose his own friends: We note that he had neither; and yet it is significantly because of him, that we now have both. It is an honor to present a new Open Source software and a novel technique for cracking the Enigma cipher on the year of his Centennial.

As does Gillogy, Sullivan, Weierud, and other contemporary Enigma researchers, We apply Index of Coincidence in various forms over a subset of the parameter space, and promote a minority of results through a series of increasingly exhaustive tests. To this general approach we contribute two exploits: Stecker Isolation, which reduces the most complex module, the steckerbrett, from ~26!! to 262 tests ; and Diagonal Conflation which prescribes a unique subset of the ringstellung by noting their inverse effect relationship with the message cipher.

We will attempt to break a message during the talk on a laptop. To improve performance we rely on OpenCL which provides cross platform access to GPU for General purpose computing.

More generally, we discuss the curve of entropy, complexity and the rapid improvement in computing power by showing that what took a national industrial effort to achieve in the 40's can now be superseded on a laptop computer.

Benjamin Gatti was born to hippies in the late 60's, grew up in California and taught himself electronics and software, traveled the World in the 90's, married abroad, and settled in Charlotte, North Carolina where he works as an independent software slacker. His hobbies include micro-controllers, music, sustainable energy & ecovillages, hackerspaces, atheism, activism, cooking, healing sick electronic appliances.

Bob Weiss is the founder of Password Crackers, Inc. (pwcrack.com) and a Defcon Goon. Bob spent his early career doing political and marketing work and lives with his family in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

 

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