The AI ​​of today can break the Enigma code of the Second World War “in a short time”, say the experts | Alan Turing

The Enigma code was a diabolical figure that took Alan Turing and its breakers with a Herculean effort to crack. However, experts say that he would have collapsed in the face of modern computers.

While Polish experts broke the first versions of the Enigma code in the 1930s and built anti-enigma machines, subsequent safety upgrades by the Germans meant Turing had to develop new machines, or “bombs”, to help their code of codebreakers to decipher enemy messages. In 1943, the machines could decipher two messages every minute.

However, while the race to break the Enigma code has become famous, credited for having shortened the Second World War up to two years, and causing various Hollywood films, the experts say that it would be a trivial question today.

“Enigma would not resist computer science and modern statistics,” said Michael Wooldridge, computer teacher and artificial intelligence expert (IA) at the University of Oxford.

The ENIGMA device used by the powers of the axis was an electro-mechanical machine that looked like a typewriter, with three rotors which each had 26 possible positions, a reflector which returned the signal through the rotors and a plugboard that exchanged pairs of letters.

Its configuration meant that even if the same key was pressed twice, a different letter would be produced each time. In addition, the initial parameters have been modified every 24 hours.

“Essentially, Enigma devices have obtained their power because the number of possible ways of which a message could be encrypted was astronomically large. Far too large for a human to verify exhaustively,” said Woooldridge, adding that the “bombs” were raw mechanical computers, looking for a huge number of possible alternatives to decipher the messages of Nazi.

Dr. Mustafa A Mustafa, lecturer in software security at the University of Manchester, added that the key to the success of Turing and his colleagues was that Enigma had a certain number of weaknesses, including that no letter would be represented as herself once pregnant.

“It was [a] Brute Force Attack, trying all the different combinations. But with these weaknesses of the enigma, they managed to do it. They managed to automate this to do it quickly enough to be able to break the code, “he said.

Today, however, the process would be much less difficult, especially because of a technology that killing itself: AI.

“It would be simple to recreate the logic of bombs in a conventional program,” said Woooldridge, noting that the IA Chatgpt model was able to do so. “Then, with the speed of modern computers, the laborious work of bombs would be done in a very short time.”

Wooldridge has added that a range of modern statistical techniques and calculation could also be deployed. “And the power of modern data is difficult to imagine,” he said, noting that modern calculation power would have stunned Turing. “Enigma would not be a distance a match for them,” he said.

Using a slightly different approach – that Woooldridge has suggested could be slower – researchers have already used an AI system formed to recognize German using Grimm fairy tales, as well as 2,000 virtual servers, To break a coded message in 13 minutes.

But while modern IT would have quickly shown the enigma, techniques such as the Rivest -Shamir -Adleman (RSA) figure – a system initially developed in 1977 and on the basis of large prime numbers – remain robust.

“In the case of the RSA, it is the problem of taking into account very large figures. Brute force techniques – by looking at all the alternatives – will simply not work on these problems,” said Woooldridge, although he noted that such techniques may not resist future developments. “If quantum computers are trying their theoretical promise, then we may need new techniques to ensure the security of our data,” he said.

But while the Enigma code would not resist modern technology for a long time, Mustafa said that cracking it during the war was a huge success, especially because it was considered unbreakable.

“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.”