This one is for my fellow crytpo buffs. A group of 60 people spent 10 years building working replicas of the Turing Bombe. This machine was responsible for cracking the German Enigma codes and probably shortened World War II by a couple years. After the war the Turing machines were destroyed and the original plans were “lost”. This must have been an incredibly challenging exercise. An article from BBC News said that GCHQ (Britain’s NSA) assisted with the development of the replica machines.
Turing machines were used a Bletchley Park in Britain. Somewhere around 3000 German messages were decrypted every day. As many as 10,000 people worked there at one point. As the article points out many were from the Women’s Royal Naval Service.
There were 3 original Enigma messages that were never broken. A project called M4 (named after the 4 Rotor Enigma cipher) is using distributed computing, like SETI, to crack these messages. The first two have been broken. If you want to donate some spare CPU cycles, get the M4 client here.
—Chris
Technorati Tags: Enigma, cryptanalysis, Bletchley Park, Turing, Bombe
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