I must say: this series was absolutely amazing! As an Engineer student, I really loved the way everything was explained. Hope the channel come back, the content is one of the best I have ever seen! 👏
There seems to be something missing from this video. There were 3 rotors on the machine but they were in a specific order and picked from a possible stack of 5. So how would this machine identify which 3 rotors were used and in what order. It sounds like it would only work if the rotors chosen are 1-2-3 and placed in that exact order.
They changed them every day in most cases, or at least every second day. Although this did increase complexity, it wasn’t insurmountable in terms of the extra possible permutations for the allied codebreakers to analyse. On top of that, some of the operating procedures used actually made it even easier. For instance, it was policy at one point that every rotor had to change position every day, so no rotor was ever in the same position from one day to the next. The problem with that is that it actually cuts the number of possible combinations each day almost in half, as if it were completely random, then from time to time some rotors would be in the same place for more than one day. So it didn’t actually increase complexity as much as it should have (this was just one of many errors in the way Enigma was implemented that led to it being decrypted). The rotor settings and the plugboard settings both added more complexity than the rotor positions themselves, so those were the main problems to overcome. Once these were nullified, the rotor positions weren’t as much of a problem, especially as once you knew them for one day, you had less to search for the next day.😁
@@yannrezk5735 Thank you. That is very informative. There were other flaws too like the requirement to send 3 letters picked at random but sent twice. This helped as analysts would know the 1st/4th, 2nd/5th ;nd 3rd/6th letters were the same. Find a rotor setting that gives you those results 3 clicks apart and voila. My question was more this. How does the machine tell the operator that the rotors to use and the order that day is 1-5-3, and the next day it would say 2-3-1 or something like that. It's super clear in the video how the operator knows the settings, but not what rotors are in use that day and in what order.
dear Sir, this might sound strange but i take full inspiration from your enigma videos. Watching your presentation, i begin to think what if the stock price is actually "enigma codes" that have hidden clue about where certain stock is going. From there, i form a simple statistics formula to predict X stock movement. I do thank you for your great videos. GBU sir
How Turing brake the Enigma? Answear is simple - he didn't. He just used "cryptologic bomb" develped by Marian Rejewski. Turing updated "bomb" to be able to decode upgraded 5-rings Enigma, but except need to have many more decoding rings (111 in Turings version, Rejewski's bomb needed just 12 rings to decode 3-rings Enigma version), whole project was exact copy of Rejewski's "cryptologic bomb".
I'm confused about the stepping action of your bombe. In the animation, the yellow rotors step anytime the red rotor goes from A->Z. But that isn't necessarily the position the enigma stepped for that configuration and ring setting. So the relative configurations may be off if the second and third rotors are stepped wrong? I remember reading that a crib wouldn't work if there was a turnover in the middle, so would it make more sense to keep the second and third rotors in sync across the bombe, and just rotate the red rotors relative to each other?
In practice, this was a much less problem as it seems. If you get a solution wich decrypts the first 12 letters to something which looked like it was valid german but suddenly turns into gibberish at the 13th letter, you know that the used turnover point (the ring position) from ring1 to ring 2 is most likely wrong and needs to be adjusted. Just do it and try again. There are only 26 possible ring positions to check, no big deal for the machine. After all you knew that the setting was correct for the first 12 letters, just the turnover needs adjustment. Also: They did not use just 1 single transmission for the cracking, but multiple messages of the day. If 1 crib didn't work, another one from a different transmission might work. Also: The turnover from the 2nd ring to the 3rd almost never mattered as most messages were not long enough to have the 3rd ring turn away from its initial position at all.
@@kallewirsch2263i'm sorry if i'm not understanding but wich cable are tested ? Like, does they test cable configuration at each tested rotor position ?
@@astrapex2163 You have watched the video? If the configuration is not correct, then powering any cable connecting the rotors powers all of them. It is only for the correct configuration, that this will not happen. So yes. This is how it worked. The individual enigmas were connected according to the "menu" (that is what they called it). The menu was derived from the encrypted message and the (guessed) plain text. The menu would be set up to form a loop: eg. 'E' translates into 'W' in position 5, 'W' translates into 'D' in position 8, 'D' translates into 'E' in position 12. Note how this forms a loop 'E' -> 'W' -> 'D' -> 'E'. 3 enigmas in the bomba were connected (all letters connected) and the rotor configuration of those 3 enigmas were set up according to the menu (assuming a key of eg 'AAA'). Then the machine was started, after stepping to the next rotor positions (of all 3 enigmas), the number of powered cables were counted. If the count was 1, then the machine stopped. If it was not 1, then all 3 enigmas did 1 step to the next rotor position (testing if AAB could be the key) and the cycle continued. The guessed plain text wasn't just a random guess. The british knew that the germans distributed eg. the weather report at specific times. So the knew that the message they received at 07:00 would start with the german word "WETTERBERICHT". There is one reported incidence, when the could not find the key but the knew about a boje in the north sea. So they ordered an attack on that boje knowing that the local station would report this attack to the head quarters. Now they had the encrypted text and they knew that somewhere in this text there would be the name of the boje. Voila: it worked.
I keep wondering, cracking one crib/menu this way reveals the message key for the encryption. But every message had another key as I understand. So how to get to the daily setting because that would be the actual goal wouldn't it?
@@Ingeniousideas Right, so, let me take the weather forecast example then. I presume it had its own message key. Which key was cracked then, the message key or the daily key? See where I'm getting at? Thanks for the other reply btw. And let me say the videos where really helpful for my understanding of the topic and I appreciate them imensly.
@@Timmerdetimmerdetim The goal of the bomba was not to crack a specific key. The goal was to find an initial rotor setting, which would decrypt the message. The procedure for the sender of the message of how to come up with the enigma settings depending on the tabulated daily key and how to create the message key is not important. Each message began with additional information for the regular receiver on how to reverse that process such that eventually he had the setting with which to decypher the message body. For the cracker however this was not important, since they were not interested in the letters of each of the keys used, but in a setting which simply would decypher the message body, no matter in which way the sender reached that setting.
@@Timmerdetimmerdetim Yes, but once you cracked the message key, you had a guranteed crib for the day key. With guranteed, it means you didn't need to make a guess on the crib, you KNEW it was a valid crib.
Very good explanation, however historical background should be corrected. Enigma was cracked by Polish mathematicians working for Polish Army in Poznan before the 2WW - in 1932 year!. The bomba = bomb (1938) was a term used by this team: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki i Henryk Zygalski. Bletchley Park used their knowledge and ideas and applied digital methods to the more and more complicated codes decryption.
صعب لكن استمر هل هذا الجهاز لتشفير الرسائل هناك طرق اسهل للتشفير لكن فك شفرة جهاز كهذا كان يستلزم حصول الحلفاء على نسخة متطابقة منه وربما تمت عن طريق الخيانات . متابعك من اليمن
That part was easy because the Polish already had some machines. Prior to the start of the war, the enigma machines were sold commerically :) They were just added to and modified for the war, and new internal rotor wiring, but the working principles remained the same.
Really excellent work. I don’t think the pronunciation of bomb matters at all. Some suggestions are that it is “bomb” because the ticking of the device is like a time-bomb or “bomb-err” because the rotating drums look like a French ice cream pudding.
Wasn't it to give recognition to the Polish mathematicans who worked out how the early commercial grade machines worked. They built a simple bombe to decrypt messages from these machines. The germans then increased the complexity of the enigma machines to make them secure enough for military use.
This and previous introduction are the best videos i have found to explain in a technical way the bombe machine. Congrats and thank you!
Thanks for your comment! Glad it helped :)
The correct pronunciation is Bombe. Sorry for the mistake. 🤕
No problem, in fact no real mistake. I have transcendental intuition. I feel the touch of the CIA in this video. Don't ask me why.
@@KRYPTOS_K5 no it's AI text-to-speech.
No issue, great work brother
I must say: this series was absolutely amazing! As an Engineer student, I really loved the way everything was explained. Hope the channel come back, the content is one of the best I have ever seen! 👏
Back soon 😊
Best video on this topic. The simulation was great.
Thank you! Means a lot!
Amazing series of videos! Any chance of you sharing this simulation?
Wish you also do a similar program on lorenz machine and colossus.
There seems to be something missing from this video. There were 3 rotors on the machine but they were in a specific order and picked from a possible stack of 5. So how would this machine identify which 3 rotors were used and in what order. It sounds like it would only work if the rotors chosen are 1-2-3 and placed in that exact order.
They changed them every day in most cases, or at least every second day. Although this did increase complexity, it wasn’t insurmountable in terms of the extra possible permutations for the allied codebreakers to analyse.
On top of that, some of the operating procedures used actually made it even easier. For instance, it was policy at one point that every rotor had to change position every day, so no rotor was ever in the same position from one day to the next. The problem with that is that it actually cuts the number of possible combinations each day almost in half, as if it were completely random, then from time to time some rotors would be in the same place for more than one day. So it didn’t actually increase complexity as much as it should have (this was just one of many errors in the way Enigma was implemented that led to it being decrypted).
The rotor settings and the plugboard settings both added more complexity than the rotor positions themselves, so those were the main problems to overcome. Once these were nullified, the rotor positions weren’t as much of a problem, especially as once you knew them for one day, you had less to search for the next day.😁
@@yannrezk5735 Thank you. That is very informative. There were other flaws too like the requirement to send 3 letters picked at random but sent twice. This helped as analysts would know the 1st/4th, 2nd/5th ;nd 3rd/6th letters were the same. Find a rotor setting that gives you those results 3 clicks apart and voila.
My question was more this. How does the machine tell the operator that the rotors to use and the order that day is 1-5-3, and the next day it would say 2-3-1 or something like that.
It's super clear in the video how the operator knows the settings, but not what rotors are in use that day and in what order.
dear Sir, this might sound strange but i take full inspiration from your enigma videos. Watching your presentation, i begin to think what if the stock price is actually "enigma codes" that have hidden clue about where certain stock is going. From there, i form a simple statistics formula to predict X stock movement. I do thank you for your great videos. GBU sir
+It is not "Bobay machine", Bomba machine. named by Polish code breaker who broke the code of enigma before WWII
Excellent!
How Turing brake the Enigma? Answear is simple - he didn't. He just used "cryptologic bomb" develped by Marian Rejewski. Turing updated "bomb" to be able to decode upgraded 5-rings Enigma, but except need to have many more decoding rings (111 in Turings version, Rejewski's bomb needed just 12 rings to decode 3-rings Enigma version), whole project was exact copy of Rejewski's "cryptologic bomb".
I'm confused about the stepping action of your bombe. In the animation, the yellow rotors step anytime the red rotor goes from A->Z. But that isn't necessarily the position the enigma stepped for that configuration and ring setting. So the relative configurations may be off if the second and third rotors are stepped wrong? I remember reading that a crib wouldn't work if there was a turnover in the middle, so would it make more sense to keep the second and third rotors in sync across the bombe, and just rotate the red rotors relative to each other?
In practice, this was a much less problem as it seems.
If you get a solution wich decrypts the first 12 letters to something which looked like it was valid german but suddenly turns into gibberish at the 13th letter, you know that the used turnover point (the ring position) from ring1 to ring 2 is most likely wrong and needs to be adjusted. Just do it and try again. There are only 26 possible ring positions to check, no big deal for the machine. After all you knew that the setting was correct for the first 12 letters, just the turnover needs adjustment.
Also: They did not use just 1 single transmission for the cracking, but multiple messages of the day. If 1 crib didn't work, another one from a different transmission might work.
Also: The turnover from the 2nd ring to the 3rd almost never mattered as most messages were not long enough to have the 3rd ring turn away from its initial position at all.
I don't understand wich cable your supposed to power on the first time and if you need to switch between cable
For each tested rotor position, you try all of the cables in sequence to figure out if one of them does not power all of them.
@@kallewirsch2263i'm sorry if i'm not understanding but wich cable are tested ? Like, does they test cable configuration at each tested rotor position ?
@@astrapex2163
You have watched the video?
If the configuration is not correct, then powering any cable connecting the rotors powers all of them.
It is only for the correct configuration, that this will not happen.
So yes.
This is how it worked. The individual enigmas were connected according to the "menu" (that is what they called it). The menu was derived from the encrypted message and the (guessed) plain text. The menu would be set up to form a loop: eg. 'E' translates into 'W' in position 5, 'W' translates into 'D' in position 8, 'D' translates into 'E' in position 12. Note how this forms a loop 'E' -> 'W' -> 'D' -> 'E'.
3 enigmas in the bomba were connected (all letters connected) and the rotor configuration of those 3 enigmas were set up according to the menu (assuming a key of eg 'AAA'). Then the machine was started, after stepping to the next rotor positions (of all 3 enigmas), the number of powered cables were counted. If the count was 1, then the machine stopped. If it was not 1, then all 3 enigmas did 1 step to the next rotor position (testing if AAB could be the key) and the cycle continued.
The guessed plain text wasn't just a random guess. The british knew that the germans distributed eg. the weather report at specific times. So the knew that the message they received at 07:00 would start with the german word "WETTERBERICHT". There is one reported incidence, when the could not find the key but the knew about a boje in the north sea. So they ordered an attack on that boje knowing that the local station would report this attack to the head quarters. Now they had the encrypted text and they knew that somewhere in this text there would be the name of the boje. Voila: it worked.
what software do you use to create the bombe machine virtually?
p.s Excellent video!
Thank you! 😊 this one is created in Visual Basic.
Wonderful job and very well explained!!! Please, do more videos like these!
Thank you! Your kind words will motivate me to keep going :)
I keep wondering, cracking one crib/menu this way reveals the message key for the encryption. But every message had another key as I understand. So how to get to the daily setting because that would be the actual goal wouldn't it?
They needed a guess/crib every day :) One way was through the weather forecast which had repeatable/predictable words.
@@Ingeniousideas Right, so, let me take the weather forecast example then. I presume it had its own message key. Which key was cracked then, the message key or the daily key? See where I'm getting at?
Thanks for the other reply btw. And let me say the videos where really helpful for my understanding of the topic and I appreciate them imensly.
@@Timmerdetimmerdetim
The goal of the bomba was not to crack a specific key. The goal was to find an initial rotor setting, which would decrypt the message.
The procedure for the sender of the message of how to come up with the enigma settings depending on the tabulated daily key and how to create the message key is not important. Each message began with additional information for the regular receiver on how to reverse that process such that eventually he had the setting with which to decypher the message body.
For the cracker however this was not important, since they were not interested in the letters of each of the keys used, but in a setting which simply would decypher the message body, no matter in which way the sender reached that setting.
@@Timmerdetimmerdetim Yes, but once you cracked the message key, you had a guranteed crib for the day key. With guranteed, it means you didn't need to make a guess on the crib, you KNEW it was a valid crib.
The Bombe was the bomb!
The best explanation
Very good explanation, however historical background should be corrected. Enigma was cracked by Polish mathematicians working for Polish Army in Poznan before the 2WW - in 1932 year!. The bomba = bomb (1938) was a term used by this team: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki i Henryk Zygalski. Bletchley Park used their knowledge and ideas and applied digital methods to the more and more complicated codes decryption.
Can you please explain us the Diagonal Board?
Yes I will try to add that part in the series.
صعب لكن استمر
هل هذا الجهاز لتشفير الرسائل
هناك طرق اسهل للتشفير
لكن فك شفرة جهاز كهذا كان يستلزم حصول الحلفاء على نسخة متطابقة منه
وربما تمت عن طريق الخيانات .
متابعك من اليمن
That part was easy because the Polish already had some machines. Prior to the start of the war, the enigma machines were sold commerically :) They were just added to and modified for the war, and new internal rotor wiring, but the working principles remained the same.
Really excellent work. I don’t think the pronunciation of bomb matters at all. Some suggestions are that it is “bomb” because the ticking of the device is like a time-bomb or “bomb-err” because the rotating drums look like a French ice cream pudding.
Thank you! 🙂 And good info about bombe. Didn't know this.
Wasn't it to give recognition to the Polish mathematicans who worked out how the early commercial grade machines worked. They built a simple bombe to decrypt messages from these machines. The germans then increased the complexity of the enigma machines to make them secure enough for military use.
This is a super cool video, so you think it would be possible to use relay computation to do this?
Thanks for your comment! I’m not really familiar with relay computation. Can’t say :)
That's a Colossus
Can you release the source code that you used for this?
rumah editor bring me to here
Are we really going to have to listen to it pronounced as bom-bay every time… going to be a long 11 min.
Welcome to 2025!!! 🎉
Hate the AI commentary. If you make the effort to creat this video, make the effort to narrate it too
Bhai yeh ai voice kyu lga rakhi gaiw hai