Cambridge student rebuilds Polish Enigma-code-breaking box that paved the way for Turing ... and Victory!

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/15/enigma_cracking_cyclometer_recreated/

By Simon Sharwood
APAC Editor
The Register
15 Jul 2020

A Cambridge post-graduate student has recreated the "cyclometer", the 
decryption device devised by Polish mathematicians that informed Alan 
Turing's later code-breaking efforts.

Turing famously devised the "Bombe", a machine that was capable of 
decrypting messages encoded by Nazi Germany's fiendish Enigma machines. 
Breaking the Enigma code produced intelligence credited with shortening 
the Second World War and saving innumerable lives. Turing's work on the 
Bombe grew into the digital computers on which you are reading this story.

While Turing has rightly been celebrated, Polish mathematician Marian 
Rejewski intuited the workings of Enigma and devised machines capable of 
decrypting Enigma-coded messages. The cyclometer was their first effort 
and a later project, "bomba kryptologiczna", was an even better 
code-breaker.

Rejewski and his colleagues were known to allied intelligence, which 
recognised the value of their work and kept the team out of Nazi hands. 
Alan Turing met the team in France to talk crypto in the early months of 
1940. The team moved to Vichy, France, and later escaped to the UK where 
they worked at Boxmoor in Hemel Hempstead, and Turing again took up their 
work to produce his own devices at Bletchley Park.

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