TECHNOLOGY:
The Enigma code, formerly deemed incomparable by Nazi Germany and famous by Alan Turing and its Bletchley Park team, would pose little challenge to modern IT power, say technology experts.
The figure, which was based on a mechanical device with rotary rotors and complex plug-line parameters, required once a massive effort and ingenuity to decode.
But today, the same task could be performed in a few minutes using advanced software and processing speeds.
“Enigma would not resist computer science and modern statistics,” said Professor Michael Wooldridge, IT expert at Oxford University.
“What has taken months of mechanical work can now be reproduced with simple and resolved programs almost instantly.”
The original Enigma machine had an astronomical number of possible parameters, changed daily, to ensure safety. It is this complexity that gave the Germans confidence in its impenetrability.
Polish mathematicians first fell in love with the first versions, but subsequent improvements forced code breakers to develop the “bomb” – a mechanical computer used to scrutinize billions of permutations.
Despite her reputation, Enigma had faults. Dr Mustafa A Mustafa, a software security teacher at the University of Manchester, said that a major weakness was that no letter could be coded in itself.
This vulnerability, combined with early automation, allowed the Turing team to eventually make the figure.
From now on, experts believe that even a basic AI model could reproduce and go beyond the capacities of code evacuate machines in wartime.
Wooldridge stressed that the AI System Chatgpt system had managed to recreate bomb logic, while cloud computing systems could do the same work in seconds.
While Enigma can be a relic of the past, more recent encryption systems such as RSA Cipher Rivest-Shamir-Adleman
“To be able to break it – it took them for months, more than a year – but to be able to do this during the life of the war, it was a huge thing,” he said.
“God knows what would have happened if we hadn’t cracked Enigma in time.” – which is based on a large number of large numbers – remaining safe for the moment. But that can change if quantum computing is up to its potential.
For all technological progress, historians and scientists emphasize that the original rupture of the enigma remains a monumental feat.
“To break something that would be unbreakable, during the pressure of the war, was extraordinary,” said Mustafa. “It has changed the course of history.”
