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Post by doomyd on Feb 27, 2017 0:14:59 GMT
Hello all, While preparing a demo of my Enigma-E for the Army Cadet detachment of which my son is a member of, I took the time to translate a part of the Original Enigma Operating Instructions into English. The original source was the scanned copy of the the document "Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine, Der Schlüssel M, Verfahren M Allgemein" from the Crypto Museum (creators of the Enigma-E electronic self build kit): www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/enigma/files/schluessel_m.pdfThe final, struck through (it appears to have been superseded in 1944) section at the back of this booklet contains instructions to Kriegsmarine personnel on how to set up their machine for use with Army communications. Seeing as this is a relatively easy setup procedure (bearing in mind that my target group were teenage Army Cadets) and furthermore isn't a long piece of text to translate, I took the trouble to translate this part into English. I'd now like to present this here, for anybody to use, who is interested in the Army Enigma: Enigma Army Operating Procedures.pdf (511.63 KB)
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Post by Arduino Enigma on Feb 27, 2017 0:54:49 GMT
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Post by doomyd on Feb 27, 2017 1:25:39 GMT
Yes, that's mine alright! The photographer's a colleague of mine. We had a fire drill that day; I'd brought in my Enigma-E to impress some colleagues, but when the fire alarm went off, I broke all the rules and took the time to collect my personal belongings, i.e. the Enigma-E! I'm not gonna let that burn!
And of course one of the custom badges he found so impressive... is the Enigma badge that I bought from your ponoko.com site!
I'm not on social media any more, hence my silence, but I've finally pulled my finger out and joined this group.
Cheers, Steve
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Post by Arduino Enigma on Feb 27, 2017 1:47:13 GMT
Good call on taking the Enigma-E, even if only a drill. When I saw the instagram picture, I searched in my email and found it. Glad to have you here communicating with us. I read your translation and was surprised at the Kenngruppe procedure. Two random letters at the beginning of the message and a scrambled version of either of the three letter groups provided at the end of the daily settings. Operationally that makes a little more sense than what we have been using here, not scrambling the indicator. The scrambling expands the number of unique indicators to 24 (6 per three letter group x 4 groups). Not sure whether this adds to the security of the protocol, since once it is known that the indicator is the last three letters, they can be sorted alphabetically and eventually 4 groups will be retrieved from all the day messages. I wonder what is lpaseen take on this...
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Post by lpaseen on Feb 27, 2017 2:50:12 GMT
I did see some other translation of schluessel_m and did then see something about sorting the letters alphabetically and look for the kennegruppen. What didn't make sense to me was that then all kennegruppen need to be alphabetic also and the samples I did see that seemed to be from real messages was not sorted. That plus that I already written code to not sort them and we using the procedure from www.enigmaworldcodegroup.com made me leave that part alone when I made the 2017 code books. Regarding scrambling, what BP did with the indicator groups was to find what network each message did belong to plus find call signals for all stations in a specific network (a stations call signal changed ever night). From that knowledge they could then collect all messages from a specific network and start working on breaking the keys. I don't think it would take them long to recognize this procedure and then scrambling them becomes useless. Of course one thing the Germans did help with in that regard was the procedure that when a message is split in to multiple parts you have to state "part 3" in the message header but you must also have different indicator groups! That means one multipart message and you have all indicator groups for that network for that day. And finally welcome to the forum doomyd
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Post by ZZ9pZa on Feb 27, 2017 12:33:10 GMT
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Post by doomyd on Feb 27, 2017 22:29:30 GMT
I did see some other translation of schluessel_m and did then see something about sorting the letters alphabetically and look for the kennegruppen. What didn't make sense to me was that then all kennegruppen need to be alphabetic also and the samples I did see that seemed to be from real messages was not sorted. That plus that I already written code to not sort them and we using the procedure from www.enigmaworldcodegroup.com made me leave that part alone when I made the 2017 code books. Regarding scrambling, what BP did with the indicator groups was to find what network each message did belong to plus find call signals for all stations in a specific network (a stations call signal changed ever night). From that knowledge they could then collect all messages from a specific network and start working on breaking the keys. I don't think it would take them long to recognize this procedure and then scrambling them becomes useless. Of course one thing the Germans did help with in that regard was the procedure that when a message is split in to multiple parts you have to state "part 3" in the message header but you must also have different indicator groups! That means one multipart message and you have all indicator groups for that network for that day. And finally welcome to the forum doomyd Hi lpaseen, I don't get it either why the Cipher Clerk is instructed to sort the letters of the Kenngruppe alphabetically, when quite clearly in real world examples the trigrams of the available Kenngruppen for a daily key aren't sorted alphabetically. Could we put it down to the bureaucracy of military command, or perhaps the procedure changed after 1940, when this instruction manual was published? And anyway, any comments, corrections, praise (lol) are welcome, and if things need changing in this document, Im more than happy to do that. I don't claim to be brilliant in German, but I can get by, and reading Fraktur font is a little hobby of mine, which certainly comes in handy when working through documents like this. And you're dead right of course regarding how simple it must have been for the boffins at BP to figure this out. As our Security Consultant at work has said, "Obscurity is not Security", something it looks like the Germans had missed the point on - The Enemy knows the System! Cheers, Steve
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Post by doomyd on Feb 27, 2017 22:37:24 GMT
Thanks for the link ZZ9pZa, I had indeed found this translation earlier, and did have the odd peek at how Tony Sale had translated the document when I was stuck with some of the more technical terms, although I tried to word it using my own style. I initially did this translation a couple of years ago, and my German has clearly improved since then, so before uploading this version, I proof read my translation and checked it against the original Fraktur German text, just to make sure there were no glaring errors in it, and did make some amendments and additions, well aware that it won't be teenage Army Cadets reading this, but Enigma experts! Tony Sale performed an epic task translating the whole document, my work is just a small fraction of the entirety, in fact just the last section of the whole work.
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