Discover Bletchley Park, the former top-secret home of British World War Two codebreaking; a place where technological innovation and human endeavour came together to make ground-breaking achievements that have helped shape the world we live in today.
During World War Two, the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), now known as the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), was based at Bletchley Park. It grew from a small team of specialists to a vast intelligence factory of thousands of dedicated women and men. This extraordinary combination of brilliant and determined people and cutting-edge technology contributed significantly to Allied victory. In tough conditions, they provided vital intelligence and developed pioneering technological innovation that had a direct and profound influence on the outcome of the war.
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We see the same camera problems from poor camera operators. 1st the machine is the main character and the 2 humans are the question and answer part of video. When filming information video keep the camera on the subject which is the machine not the 2 asking, informing etc. Maybe in the near future a true process could happen such as machine operator is handed a message, he/she types. So what happens after that? Someone had to copy the encrypted message, then send message by Morse code. Someone received and entered into machine to get the message! 😮
I read the book The Rose Code I wish you would remove that loud music it's louder than the voices. I put on the closed caption, nothing appears. Thank you posthumously because I know you're all gone now but wow you really worked hard to save your country and it was freezing and you still had outhouses. I don't think you had enough food and I will thank you later when I see you.
Thank you for your efforts to share this important info. In the future please consider either lowering or eliminating the background music. I cannot hear the speaker. The information you're presenting is far more interesting.
How did the codebreaker know when one of the wheels turned over? They see (as I understand it) the message as a series of letters on a crib sheet and never see the machine. What in the actual encrypted message indicates that the wheel has turned?
The right-hand wheel turns one position after each letter. After one complete rotation, the middle wheel moves one position and after one complete rotation of the middle wheel, the left wheel moves one position. You can see this nicely in the videos of the bomb.
The one and only totally, 100% secure system is one that has no access at all. So, since that doesn’t do anyone any good, the next decision is: What can we build that has good enough or reasonable security, uses current technology, but is within reason to train personnel for optimum operation.
Seems to me the non-self-encipherment property could have been eliminated without making the machine more complicated, just by eliminating the reflector and only passing the signal through the rotors in one direction. But would that have had other undesirable effects on the security?
Correct - the idea of the "reflector" and sending back the stream through the rotors was a very bad idea and even made the enigma more complicated to build Another design flaw was, that each rotor only had one notch for turning the next rotor one step further. This has the impact that the second rotor is moving only every 26th character and the third rotor only every 676th character. I think 99,9% of all messages were shorter than 676 characters so the third rotor never was moved. The later added fourth rotor would be only turned in a message longer than 17576 character. If somebody was able to send 3 characters per second using the morse code it would have taken 90 minutes to send such a long message. So from a cracking perspective the third and fourth rotor together with the sticker board could be treated as a "static" character substition which is is relativly easy to crack By adding more than one notch to each rotor it would be much harder
Alas, the very poor audio recording in this video makes it extremely difficult to watch. I highly recommend getting a better microphone for recording and re-doing this video from scratch. Best of luck!
Very interesting, how many permutations of the initial wiring could there have been? I am intrigued that the British didn't try the A-A, B-B one. Is it 26x26x26? I ask just because it is probably one of the easier challenges amongst very difficult ones. I can just imagine someone asking them in a meeting whether they had tried every permutation and them saying they had, even though they hadn't tried the one that few would think to try.
Could do with a diagram - I believe it’s a Lee Enfield Mk4 .003 being referred to. I don’t know about the “piling swivel”, which in my case I will most certainly not be getting. Reed was criticised for accepting a K: wood he accept Charles 3’s?
The problem was not repeated characters but that enigma could never encrypt a character to itself. So if in the encrypted message at some position was an "E" you could be 100% sure that the clear text at that position could not be an "E". Knowing this the britains could guess a longer word which might be in the message and then find the positions in the decrypted text there this word might be. Without such a correct guess the "bombs" could not find out if they found a correct key. But luckily for the britains all messages of one day used the same key and some of this messages could be relativly easy guessed - like the weather reports. If you know the weather you could guess how the clear text of such a weather report was as it was send always in the same format.
@@thomaswalder4808 I'll try to rephrase, couldn't you have achieved the same effect by having an extra letter that stood for "repeat cleartext letter" so you send E as E and L as L enough times to throw off the codebreakers?
@@abrahamedelstein4806 Repeated letter were NOT the problem of enigma, The problem was that a letter could never encrypted to itself. So if you saw an "A" in the cipher text you could be 100% sure that the source text at that position was NOT an "A".
@@thomaswalder4808 Alright, so give me some rope here because I have fundamentally misunderstood the problem, because in my layman's head I would think that if you have an extra letter in the system that tells the operator to simply transmit the inputted letter as written in cleartext that it would solve this problem. As a hypothetical example, I write down BLUE on the machine and B comes out X, L as C and then the machine tells me to write U and then it goes back to conventional encryption as E comes as D. I my head, while admittedly probably opening up other avenues of decryption, should solve the problem as described since you can no longer be certain that some of the letters have gone back on themselves.
@@abrahamedelstein4806 How should the receiver know if that "U" in the encrypted message is clear text and must not be decrypted? The receiver need to know the positions of this "clear text letters" in the encrypted message - but how?
With stuff like the plugboard, you say it was a weaker than a more complex plugboard, but how much did it add over no plugboard? Likewise with the reflector, it was weaker than the more complex setup of dual paths through the rotors, but how much did it add over only going through the rotors once? Overall were any of these things so bad that it would have been more secure if they had left the feature out entirely?
"but how much did it add over only going through the rotors once?" It added nothing - the number of possible settings of enigma did not increase by the reflector - it even weaken the encryption.
