I recently watched the film “The Imitation Game” and it's brilliant despite Keira Knightley’s failed attempt at a posh British accent. Everyone should watch it especially if you're interested in technology. It’s about the life of a genius called Alan Turing, he is also known as the father of modern computer science. That means the very tech you're using to read this blog works on the foundations of his discoveries. His major breakthrough took place at GCHQ during WW2, he made a machine that decrypted secret German messages they sent using the Enigma machine. Furthermore, historians believe his work shortened the war by two years and saved thousands of lives. To me stories don’t get much more interesting than this, how us Brits used maths and computer science to help the Allies win WW2 and save Europe from fascism.

After watching the film I became very interested in the Enigma machine and I’m going to use Ruby to explain to you how it works. If you don’t know the Ruby programming language don’t worry, you’ll be surprised how much syntax you understand.

Firstly it’s important to realise the Enigma machine is just one big circuit. Each time a key is pressed at least one rotor is rotated which changes the circuitry of the machine thus lighting a different letter faced light bulb. The rotors are the only moving parts within the circuit and each have 26 steps, one for each letter of the alphabet. When a key is pressed the right rotor rotates by a step, when this reaches a full revolution the middle rotor rotates by a step, and when the middle rotor does a full revolution the left rotor rotates a step. Here is a video to best explain the circuitry:

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I found the best way to understand the machine was to visualise the path of an electron traveling through the circuit after a key is pressed. First of all we get to the plugboard, here we literally swap 10 of the 26 letters. For example D becomes E and therefore E becomes D. In Ruby we can model this as Plugboard = Hash[*('A'..'Z').to_a.sample(20)] and then Plugboard.merge!(Plugboard.invert) so we can make it reflective. As for the 6 letters that are untouched and simply map to themselves we can make the value default to the entered key with Plugboard.default_proc = proc { |_, key| key }.

Next we get to the rotors, think of each of the rotors as a substitution cypher, each of its two sides has 26 metal contacts. And there is a mess of 26 wires inside that randomly pair the contacts. We can model a rotor as Hash[('A'..'Z').zip(('A'..'Z').to_a.shuffle)], for the return journey we can call invert on the hash before passing it a key.

The electron travels through all the rotors and then it gets to the reflector. The reflectors job is simply to turn the electron around and pass it back through the rotors. We can model it with Reflector = Hash[*('A'..'Z').to_a.shuffle] and Reflector.merge!(Reflector.invert).

It will now go back through the rotors, through the plugboard again and finally hit the letter faced lightbulb which would indicate to the operator what the letter had been encrypted or decrypted to, depending wether the operator is receiving or sending messages.

I have written a gist of an Enigma machine using the above code, please feel free to comment below if any of it needs explanation.

[gist id="426faf8d241d1b255991" file="enigma_machine.rb"]

Why was it secure?

The Enigmas security comes from the large number of configurations the machine can be in. Every month German operators were issued a code book that told them what setting to put their plugboard and rotors in for each day of that month.

The Enigma machine came with 5 rotors to choose from and the machine used 3. You have 5 to choose from, then 4, then 3. Order matters here therefore this yielded 5 x 4 x 3: 60 combinations .

. Then each rotor has 26 starting positions. This yielded 26 x 26 x 26: 17,576 combinations .

. The plugboard maths is more complicated, Andrew Hodges explains it well. The number of ways of choosing m pairs out of n objects is n! /((n-2m)! m! 2m). Therefore the enigma machine has (26! / ((26-2*10)! 10! 2^10):150, 738, 274, 937, 250 combinations.

Multiply 60 x 17,576 x 150,738,274,937,250 and you have 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 combinations! And that is what GCHQ were faced with. They had to figure out which one of the combinations the Germans Enigma machines were using for that day so we could understand what the Germans were saying to each other. Furthermore the next day it would change making any promising work from the day before useless, a moving target!

This is where Turing's master mind came in. Him and others built a bombe machine that speed up the process of working out what setting the Enigma machines were in for that day. First they tried guessing a small section of plaintext within the ciphertext, then the bombe was used to find the setting that would yield this plaintext through brut force. If I get the time I would love to study the bombe and try and write it in Ruby.

Did UX lose Germans the war?

The reflector was practical because it meant the Enigma machine operators used the same setting to send and receive messages. This was great but it also meant that a letter could never map to itself. This was a major weakness in the system, because it allowed the code breakers to eliminate possible solutions when the ciphertext and the putative piece of plaintext had the same letter in the same place. And it was this weakness Turing exploited with his bombe machine.

Why did they only use 10 pairs for the plugboard?

This puzzled me for a while, if you play around with the n! /((n-2m)! m! 2m) formula you will see 11 plug pairs yields the most combinations, with the number decreasing after 11. Here is the best explanation to why they used 10:

British cryptanalysts believed that the Germans chose 10 plugs because this resulted in the maximum number of plug-board permutations. While the actual maximum occurs for 11 plugs, the discrepancy could well be a mistake in slide-rule computations on the part of the Germans." — Deavours and Kruh (1985), "Machine Cryptography and Modern Cryptanalysis.

So because they didn't have computers back then doing maths with large numbers was difficult and had to be done by hand, and they simply believe it was a slide rule mistake.