Sunday, November 24, 2013

Section 2.12 ENIGMA, due Nov 25

1. Difficult: the hardest part was following along with the description of the electronics in the Enigma machine--but they were just trying to give a general overview of how it worked. There is a hard-coded permutation given by the letter plugs, and rotors that constantly change the permutations on every keystroke. I didn't quite follow how decryption was the same as encryption, or what they meant, but ah well.

As for the permutations and the decomposition into cycles, this made sense to me. The way they broke the enigma was a little more iffy.

2. Interesting: I think it's interesting that the attack outlined in the book dealt mostly with not the machine itself, but the protocols being used. Because the message key was always encoded first, twice in a row, then the code breakers were able to recognize this and use it to their advantage.

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