Mathematician cracks Enigma machine
Development group TopCoder yesterday announced a winning algorithm in a recently held competition to crack the infamous World War II Enigma encryption machine.
According to the group Po-Ru Loh, a Ph.D. student in Mathematics at MIT, was able to partially defeat the machine with consistency by using some of the ideas put forward by his predecessors.
The competition challenged TopCoder members to quickly reproduce what thousands of mathematicians had achieved at the Bletchley Park encrypted intelligence headquarters during World War II using modern computers.
Competitors were informed of the workings of a virtual replica of the machine, but were given no information about the details of its wiring, and had to write computer algorithms which learned about the wiring by looking only at encoded messages.
The machines used to achieve this were “billions” of times more powerful than the supercomputers that Bletchley Park scientists used in the 1940s said a company release.
According to Rob Hughes, President and COO of TopCoder, competitions such as these are relevant to modern society because of the skills they encourage.
“With increasing concern over cyber terrorism in the form of online attacks on utility grids, hacking of military command feeds and compromising of sensitive financial and healthcare information systems, demonstrated encryption and countermeasure skills are an attractive core competency of many of our members.”
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