British WW2 Codebreaking
From Londonhua WIKI
British WW2 Codebreaking
 Caption | |
| Location | Bletchly Park |
|---|---|
Contents
Abstract
The paragraph should give a three to five sentence abstract about your entire London HUA experience including 1) a summary of the aims of your project, 2) your prior experience with humanities and arts courses and disciplines, and 3) your major takeaways from the experience. This can and should be very similar to the paragraph you use to summarize this milestone on your Profile Page. It should contain your main Objective, so be sure to clearly state a one-sentence statement that summarizes your main objective for this milestone such as "a comparison of the text of Medieval English choral music to that of the Baroque" or it may be a question such as "to what extent did religion influence Christopher Wren's sense of design?"
Introduction
I suggest you save this section for last. Describe the essence of this project. Cover what the project is and who cares in the first two sentences. Then cover what others have done like it, how your project is different. Discuss the extent to which your strategy for completing this project was new to you, or an extension of previous HUA experiences.
As you continue to think about your project milestones, reread the "Goals" narrative on defining project milestones from the HU2900 syllabus. Remember: the idea is to have equip your milestone with a really solid background and then some sort of "thing that you do". You'll need to add in some narrative to describe why you did the "thing that you did", which you'd probably want to do anyway. You can make it easy for your advisors to give you a high grade by ensuring that your project milestone work reflects careful, considerate, and comprehensive thought and effort in terms of your background review, and insightful, cumulative, and methodical approaches toward the creative components of your project milestone deliverables.
Section 1: Background
Enigma
What is it and why was it a big deal
In order to communicate with troops on the battlefield and submarines away from base radio signals were utilized. This was a huge thing to do, but it did have it's drawbacks. As it was radio signals the enemy could intercept them. To protect the messages they needed to be enciphered. In the 1920s a German Engineer named Arthur Scherbius designed many different cipher machines. He settled on a design and called it Enigma.[1] This original design for Enigma was based upon a 26 letter keyboard for inputting the plaintext message, 26 lamps to show the cipher letters, a power supply, three removable wired wheels that rotate around a common axis, a fixed reflector, and a fixed entry wheel. How this was setup introduced two important features; no letter can encipher itself, and there is symmetry of plain-cipher pairs, ex. if J enciphers M, then M enciphers J.[2] This scrambling of letters would have been the equivalent of a complex substitution cipher if the wheels didn't move, but they did. Whenever a key was pressed a mechanical mechanism advanced the wheel one position, so after twenty-six key presses the first wheel would return to its starting position. Instead of being the same the second wheel would then turn, and once that wheel make it all the way around then the third wheel would turn. This rotating mechanism made the enciphering process very complex as all three wheels would not have returned to their original positions until 16,900 letters would have been enciphered.[3] This rotating motion made things difficult, but several other parts of the machine made things even more difficult. One of these was the option to take off the three wheels and reorder them in six different ways, this produced 101,400 different substitution alphabets. To add even more of a headache for anyone trying to decrypt the messages, the second rotor could be started in any one of its 26 positions which created 105,456 possible starting positions and substitution alphabets, and that's with having an Enigma machine which was the best case scenario.[4]
The German Military did not think this provided sufficient protection, so they made some changes to the design for their use. One major change that they introduced was the plugboard. The plugboard used up to thirteen short cables to switch letters at input and output of the machine. If, for example, B was connected to R, then whenever a B was pressed it would go into the rotors as an R, and vice versa. Also if an R came out of the rotors, the B light would turn on, and vice versa. This vastly increased the number of possibilities, as the plugboard settings have more than 10 million million possible settings, this made the total number of possible combinations rise to more than 10 million million million.[5] PUT IN ABOUT ADDING MORE ROTORS AND 4 ROTORS FOR NAVY
To set up an Enigma Machine[6]
1) The Operator would consult the list provided for the day's ground settings and turn the rotors to those positions
2) The Operator would choose three random letters as the start position to encipher the message with
3) The Operator would then encode the start position twice
4) The Operator would turn the rotors to the start position and encode the message
5) The radio operator then would transmit the encoded message using Morse code
These changes made the number of possibilities unimaginable and theoretically unbreakable, but in use the Germans made several key mistakes.
Bletchley Park
What is Bletchley Park and what is special about it
Mansion
Additional information on the Mansion
Hut 8
Additional information of the Hut
Alan Turing
Who is Alan Turing, what did he do, and how did he do it
Gordon Welchman
Who is Gordon Welchman, what did he do
Bombe
What is the Bombe, what does it do, who created it
In the multi-step process of breaking Enigma the Bombe was essential. All parts of the process are important but without the Bombe doing automated checking Enigma would have stayed unbreakable. The purpose of the Bombe was to check the 17,576 possible configurations of the rotors, which it did in about 10.5 minutes.[7]
The Impact
The impact of the cracking Enigma, what it did for the British and the Allies, and the impact it has had on encryption
Section 2: Deliverable
Enigma Recreation
Virtual recreation of an enigma machine
The Math behind it
Math behind the Enigma machine and showing why it was such a difficult problem
Gallery
Conclusion
In this section, provide a summary or recap of your work, as well as potential areas of further inquiry (for yourself, future students, or other researchers).
References
- ↑ Churchhouse, R. (2002). Codes and ciphers: Julius Caesar, the Enigma, and the Internet. Cambridge University Press. pp 111.
- ↑ Churchhouse, R. (2002). Codes and ciphers: Julius Caesar, the Enigma, and the Internet. Cambridge University Press. pp 112-115.
- ↑ Churchhouse, R. (2002). Codes and ciphers: Julius Caesar, the Enigma, and the Internet. Cambridge University Press. pp 119.
- ↑ Churchhouse, R. (2002). Codes and ciphers: Julius Caesar, the Enigma, and the Internet. Cambridge University Press. pp 119-120.
- ↑ Churchhouse, R. (2002). Codes and ciphers: Julius Caesar, the Enigma, and the Internet. Cambridge University Press. pp 119-120.
- ↑ Churchhouse, R. (2002). Codes and ciphers: Julius Caesar, the Enigma, and the Internet. Cambridge University Press. pp 123.
- ↑ Turing, D. (2014). Bletchley Park Demystifying the Bombe. pp 12.