Bombe Rebuild Project

The Turning Bombe machine

The Turing Bombe was a machine that truly turned the tide of war but the machine remained top secret. After 60 years, John Harper completed a rebuild of this wonderful machine.

 

Last month, for the first time since the end of the war, a full demonstration of a working Bombe took place in Bletchley Park. The Turing Bombe was designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman to break into the message traffic, encrypted with the notorious German Enigma cipher machine.

The Bombe was an electromechanical device that searched for the enigma settings for a given piece of plain and cipher text. When an Enigma message was intercepted, codebreakers had to search for cribs. These cribs were presumed pieces of plain text within the encrypted message. This could be "An Der Oberbefehlshaber", "An Gruppe" or "Es Lebe Den Fuhrer" or any other standardized piece of text.

Once a crib was located (there were some techniques for that) the associations between the letters of the ciphertext and their plain version were entered in the Bombe. The Bombe, which contains a large number of drums, each replicating the rotors of the Enigma, ran through all possible settings to find the key settings that belong to the given pieces of cipher and plain text. Once these settings were found all messages, encrypted with these setting, could be deciphered.

More information on the rebuild of the Turing Bombe can be found on John Harpers website, with some nice pictures of the Bombe project. For more details on how the Turing Bombe worked you should visit Graham Ellsbury's Bombe pages. To see the actual Bombe you will have to visit Bletchley Park, which also has a great Enigma And Friend exhibit, and is really worth while the trip.

Enigma at School

Visit Enigma at School

The story of the Enigma cipher machine is a combination of technology, military history and the mysterious world of espionage, code breakers and intelligence.

 

As it happens, these are the perfect ingredients to attract the attention of young people. The art of teaching is an art of entertaining. Without the interest of the students it's hard to bring over the importance of maths. History is boring if you don't care about who invaded Poland 67 years ago.

But if you can catch the attention of your students with secret codes and codebreakers, top secret missions or stories on U-boats and intelligence services, its only a small step to the maths and statistics, used for codebreaking, or the importance of WW2 history. The possiblilities to link the story of the Enigma machine to these so called boring lessons are unlimited. More at Enigma at School.

Fialka Simulator Software

The Russian FIALKA M125

Last year, the Crypto Museum created its wonderful pages on the Russian Fialka, an iconic Cold War crypto machine. Vyacheslav Chernov from the Ukrain wrote a very realistic simulation of the Fialka M125, fully compatible with the real Fialka machines.

Meanwhile, his software also emulates the models M125-M, M125-3MN and the 8-rotor M125-3MR. The Fialka simulator is now available at the Crypto Museum Fialka Pages.