Lorenz: Hitler's "Unbreakable" Cipher Machine 

Oh wow. That's wonderful. Thanks for watching.

Does your family have any stories about what your grandfather put himself through to pull the key out of this machine? Or did he never say anything about his part in ULTRA?

That £108k in today's money!!! I mean the figure sounds right, but that is way more than people usually have in savings

It was far rarer than Enigma. Unlike Enigma which was ultimately a perfected version of the civilian Enigma this was custom made and secret.

@@florinivan6907 The code breakers had their work cut out for them. BE SAFE & WELL!

Hero of the Beach The bits of card?

The lighting in general and also the cards, but the angled label overlays on the machine were what stood out to me. Very, very nice. Also, that's a really cool shirt.

That all due to our filmmaker Ben.

He's a heck of a guy!

singingbanana That's also because you're stunning ;)

You hide behind the word love but in fact you're feeling schadenfreude. Don't pretend.

As is the case in a lot of computer security. Humans are almost always the weakest part of the chain. If cyber security experts had their way, every password would be a random str of characters stored in a password vault. Yet people would create passwords like 12345 if they were allowed

@@emilyscloset2648 sure, and if enigma and lorenz were alive today they could be cracked by cat videos let say. Got more wisdom to spit?

​@@emilyscloset2648wrong.. cyber security EXPERTS know the length of the password is more important than the complexity... The password: Thequickbrownfixjumpedoverthelazy7dog is stupid easy to remember but a super computer would churn on it until the end of the universe and not crack it 5:02

+Badatstuff The breakers got absolutely no glory... the existence of the Colossus machine was a state secret... Churchill ordered most of them destroyed, and all involved were sworn to secrecy... see, the Lorenz machines were still in use up until 1960! Tommy Flowers designed the first fully digital computer, and never got the credit... Eckert and Mauchly got the credit for Eniac instead. The information was only recently declared non-secret. AFA the inventor of the Lorenz machine, it was very derivative of the Enigma, which had been around for over a decade before WW2... inventing a breakable code does not bring glory! Read the recent book _Colossus_ for more.

Pls explain? What was Purple Code??

Thanks very much.

McJaews This might be dull for other people. I write a script, and film it in one or two minute chunks. No autocue, I just have to remember short sections at a time. That seems to work best for me. Numberphile is done differently, that is just a conversation and Brady has to edit around the mistakes.

singingbanana It's still impressive how you're able to keep the delivery so consistent:) Then again, you're a pretty bright guy:P

Alex McGaw That sounds very similar!

It would have been just really frustrating

AlanKey86 Yup, so the motor wheels also have pins on the outside. The first mu wheel has 61 pins (and so has a rotation of 61), and the second mu wheel has 37 pins (and a rotation of 37). Each pin can be set to on or off, so you can create a fairly random string of on and offs as the wheels move. The first mu wheel moves for every character. If the pin on the first mu wheel is switched on, it will move the second mu wheel. If the pin on the second mu wheel is switched on, it will move the five psi-wheels.

singingbanana I guess it's no coincidence that 41, 61, and 37 are all prime? Perhaps you could do a Numberphile at some point about exactly why that's significant? Would a 36-pin wheel be really easy to decode because of all its factors?

rebmcr Yup, the wheel rotations were coprime giving the longest possible rotational period. I didn't have time to include good stuff like that.

singingbanana You really should make a video about that though, I am currently reading "Cryptonomicon" and it was explained in a really nice way in that book.

ALAN

***** That's why I do it! Thank you!

Maybe someday I´ll actually grow enough courage to make my own educational videos. That´d be fantastic! Thank YOU.

for real.... why on earth could/would you dislike a clear explanation of a very complicated process????

Every single video on youtube has at least a tiny amount of dislikes. I think there might be a few number of bots that auto dislike a lot of things.

Dislikes probably comes from Sweden. The mathematician Arne Buerling solved the first two versions of this machines with paper and pencil. Then the result was flown to England. No comment of that would give a thumbs down...

@@perolovson1715 Arne Beurling is most famous for breaking the Siemens und Halske T52 which was a different machine used in the same network. This was an amazing accomplishment though, and definitely deserves a mention. FRA also broke the Lorentz in 1943.

Mirek Heikkila Thanks a lot!

Ñ 0

That one turned out to be fairly easily cracked by anyone with a backup of any single file encrypted by the program since the key = original XOR encrypted.

+fsmv _"The crazy thing is that the cypher it used, the one time pad, ..."_ It was not a one-time-pad; the key would repeat. The period was very long, but it did repeat.

I just remembered that we had the Navajo code talkers. I still wonder if this was all.

Landon Kryger The British had TypeX and the US had SIGABA. Both were Enigma rip-offs. They were harder to break than Enigma because the rotors moved more frequently or less predictably. They were not broken by the German, but they had different priorities. Enigma is now famous because it was broken.

Because we won and the winners tend to not give up all of their secrets, especially considering we were aware we would be entering interesting times with the Soviets.

+singingbanana _"The British had TypeX and the US had SIGABA. Both were Enigma rip-offs."_ I don't know much about TypeX, but SIGABA was definitely not a ripoff of Enigma. About the only thing they had in common was that they used rotors, and Enigma was not the first rotor machine. SIGABA had 15 rotors. Five were used for encryption. The next five produced signals that were fed to the third set of five, The output of the third set controlled the rotation of the encrypting rotors.

One of the staff at Bletchley Park told me that TypeX was indeed a ripoff of Enigma, and the British feared violating patents even though the war was soon to breakout :P

Yakul I just had help. I'll probably be back to filming in my living room soon.

dsiefus No they didn't close it off. But we filmed first thing in the morning, and it takes people sometime to reach the Lorenz bit. We finished around 11.30 and there was a crowd by then.

CAPITAL EKS By "zeros" I mean anything after the first digit.

singingbanana Oh, my bad.

DiEvAlDiEvAl it is if you round to 1 sig fig

Actually 2^501 = 6546781215792283740026379393655198304433284092086129578966582736192267592809349109766540184651808314301773368255120142018434513091770786106657055178752 has only 16 zeros in it :D www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=DigitCount%5B2%5E501%2C+10%2C+0%5D

DiEvAlDiEvAl an end can be of any size

Sanulay Hey. And did you find my Star Trek video too?

singingbanana Yes. That video felt a little familiar so I might have watched it a long time ago already. Not that I mind - it was pretty interesting. I love all kinds of in-depth analysis of my favorite TV shows.

The Lorenz machine was attached to a regular teleprinter, so you set up the Lorenz machine for enciphering, and typed your message into the teleprinter. The recipient's teleprinter had a Lorenz machine with the same settings, so it decoded automatically and its teleprinter produced the original message. Unlike the Enigma machine, neither person ever saw, nor needed to see, the enciphered version of the message. You could also prepare your message on punched tape and feed that through the teleprinter on 'auto' mode. The error that the Lorenz operator made came about because 4000 characters is quite long to have to type in all over again. It was poor atmospheric conditions that caused the operator to have to send the message again, and it was actually because he changed the message a little bit that Tiltman was able to disentangle them.

LaMaisondeCasaHouse I've done something on it before The curious case of the WWII carrier pigeon and the unbreakable code

Now that's what I call prompt service! TY!

it really doesnt matter what people know my age like what are they even gonna do w/ it. "Whoa, this person's 13 years old! That means I can... idk..."

Again, I just don't see the point in not telling my age

+Franc[e]sco The lorenz machine might be a computer, depending on your definition.

+DaffyDaffyDaffy33322 Not in the slightest... purely mechanical sequencer. It could do nothing but scramble.

Thank you!

hehehehe

In the 1970s some parts of the complete story were garbled, even by well meaning people, because some parts were still secret. However that was still alongside some very good accounts of the story. The complete story has been known for forty years now and I don't think that happens anymore. However, for everyone's information: The Polish started recruiting mathematicians in 1932, this was a unique approach in itself, as codebreakers were traditionally linguists. Marian Rejewski deduced the wiring of the military Enigma without seeing the military Enigma itself, they had a commercial Enigma so knew the principle but not the wiring. They could then build their own replicas. During the '30s the Polish were breaking Army and Airforce Enigma based on six letters of code at the beginning of each message. This was a secret rotor position chosen by the operators themselves that could be different for each message, but that position was put at the beginning of the message in code - using Enigma itself. This secret setting was repeated making six letters of code. The Polish achievements were an inspiration to the British codebreakers, but there was a couple of problems. First, the Polish method didn't work for the navy and breaking the navy Enigma was especially important. The navy also used a secret rotor position at the beginning of the message, but their procedure involved a code book that the Polish hadn't figured out. The second problem was that the Polish methods would stop working if the army and airforce change their procedure and stop repeating the secret rotor position. Turing's method was a different idea. To try and guess part of the text (using a clue that a letter can't be itself), and deduce the correct setting from there. So this is a very different method to break Enigma, one that was not based on the secret rotor position at the beginning of a message. The Polish and British codebreaking machines were different since they were both purpose built machines designed to run two different codebreaking ideas. In May 1940 the Germans did change their procedures and stopped repeating the secret rotor position. From that point on the British used Turing's methods exclusively.

+singingbanana Thank you for replying. I will disagree with one point - truth in the UK might have been known for 40 years, but it still isn't wide knowledge - The reason was partially Political - Poland was in an Eastern Bloc, and what's worse Britain and France had alliance with Poland to send Land troops helping within 14 days. On 12th September they agreed not to do that, that's why on 17th Stalin invaded. This is more France's fault, because mobilization process in UK was longer than in France - France was already mobilized, and with 1,5 million troops in the east Germany would have a huge problem. I think that first Public, and i mean Public, not in the conference room of Academia, recognition of Polish Mathematicians came from Tony Blair. Along the lines: "We broke Enigma, and Polish helped" - as you say GIGANTIC contribution of Bletchley park, was using the flaw that letter cannot be itself (BTW - I did watch your videos on Numberphile, Doctor and they were very informative - even if I knew all of that, fan since at least 3 years - I discovered your channel today, and Lorenz machine - someone finally covered that). Apropos recruiting Mathematicians to break codes - Poland did this since 1918, when they broke Soviet codes. That's why Poland had such close relationships with Japan - during WWII Polish operators, worked in puppet state Manchukuo, still breaking Soviet codes, and Polish crews even those on ships given by British refused to fight Japanese - in return, Polish cryptographists, used Manchukuo diplomatic passports (that were recognized by Germans), to smuggle different things. And information to the Allies often went the way: Polish spy => his friend from the good old days in Japanese consulate in occupied Poland => Japanese embassy in Sweden =>British embassy in Sweden => London. About this recruiting it was 1918 or 1919, but the first real effort was finalized in 1932 indeed, when they already had Mathematicians in Counter Inteligence (Section 2 of General Staff). Earlier it was just Counter Inteligence that recruited Mathematicians, and other specialists - in 1919 they were also radio specialist, since Poland had 2 (sic!) working Radio stations. Found him! : It was 1919, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Kowalewski he was polymath, both mathematician and linguist - among other things - he recruited Sierpiński to Cypher Bureu for example.

It's just like the telephone: every country has a different first which happens to have been developed by someone from that country. So yes, in Germany the Zuse Z3 is officially the first computer but in the rest of the world it isn't.

The first computer was Babbage's Analytical engine, but was never built. The Z3 could not do conditional branching.

There are (at least) two books called Colossus! One is by Paul Gannon, and I bought a copy at Bletchley Park when I visited a couple of years ago. The other book is by Jack Copeland and many others, including contributions by Flowers, Tutte, Donald Michie, Jack Good. Copeland's book was the one recommend by Prof Dave Brailsford (of Computerphile fame) and I'm steadily working my way through it. Both books are very detailed and incredibly interesting.