Monday, November 23, 2009

2.12

1. I'm not going to pretend I know exactly how the Enigma works. I grok the permutations and stuff, but I don't know how the mechanics of the machine works. Which leads us to...

2. At this time, computation was still in its relative infancy. Whether Alan Turing's involvement at Bletchley Park abetted his role as the father of modern computation or vice versa, I'm uncertain, but the timing is interesting. The reason I bring this up is because one of the weaknesses was in their "error correcting codes" which I think fall under the umbrella of coding theory. Since radio transmission was prone to error, they introduced direct redundancy which weakened their security. It is exactly this situation that led Claude Shannon to develop the mathematical theory of communication, information theory, which explores the physical limits of information transfer through a noisy channel. Physical might not be the right word. Anyway, what I am spending far too long to get at is it's pretty amazing that they could reverse engineer such a convoluted device. We have a hard enough time seeing a string of numbers and determining how it was encrypted, but we have at least some idea. It would be very easy for the Germans to obscure their messages in simple ways so that it would be harder for a cracker to realize they were on the right track. It really does make you think about 2 Nephi 31, to a point.

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