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"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 ______________________________________________________________ Spooks mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/spooks Help: http://mailman.qth.net/faq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] - Visit http://www.spynumbers.com/ for complete information about Spy Numbers Stations
