Enigma Machine on eBay

• Neil
  July 18th, 2007 at 8:41 pm

  Isn’t it kinda worthless to just have one of these? Wouldn’t you need 2 to be able to send encrypted messages to anyone?

• yayo
  July 19th, 2007 at 1:50 am

  nope, you can send the machine with James Bond ^g^

  I think the public key is one of those two roses in the right…

• Sid Morrison
  July 19th, 2007 at 12:44 pm

  Well, yeah, I guess it isn’t much use to have just one — if that is really why you are buying it! But people will be buying this because it is a rare surviving bit of WWII history. If all you want to do is pass coded messages, you can do that much more securely now with free 128-bit (or more) encryption software and now hardware. Alternatively, if you really wish to do it the Enigma way, there are software “Enigma emulator” programs out there.

  The Enigma machines were a wonderful idea, but the Germans were a bit too complacent with the “unbreakability” of it, especially when machines fell into Allied hands and British & Polish cryptanalysts were able to figure them out.

  The machine shown is one of the simpler (less difficult to decipher) ones, as it has only 3 rotors (wheels above the keyboard). This is typical of ones used by the German Army. The Kriegsmarine (Navy) and Abwehr (intelligence service) typically used 4 rotor variants. Later 5 and even 6 rotor versions were made. None were bulletproof when you knew how they were wired and if knew (or could deduce) the wheel setups. Without knowing those, though, they were pretty well impossible to brute-force with the computing technology of the day.

• yayo
  July 19th, 2007 at 5:13 pm

  http://www.xat.nl/enigma/

  and a java applet emulator
  http://russells.freeshell.org/enigma/

• cb
  July 19th, 2007 at 6:04 pm

  I took a (bad) photo of one at the WWII Museum in New Orleans earlier this year. I guess if you win the ebay auction you could send messages to the museum.

  http://digimills.com/2007/06/06/a-visit-to-the-d-day-museum/

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