A colleague of mine is getting married and her friends gave her a bunch of puzzles to solve. One puzzle is about the Enigma cipher machine, that’s why she asked me for help.
She has to go to this page (a flash simulation of the Enigma cipher machine) and solve this puzzle: If ANSWER is YRKRHL, then insert ENIGMA into enigma to find the answer…
It was immediately clear to me that we were dealing with a KPA: find the key (Enigma cipher machine configuration) that encrypts ANSWER into YRKRHL, and then we’ll be able to find the encrypt ENIGMA.
I quickly wrote a C# program to brute force all the starting positions (AAA – ZZZ), based on this article. At first my program didn’t find a solution, so I added brute forcing of the rotors and steckers configuration. By then my colleague had received a hint from her friends, which allowed us to set the correct configuration of the rotors, starting positions and steckers.
The funny thing is that my program found several other solutions:
Solution: rotor 243 key JRP steckers ACLX cleartext ANSWER ciphertext YRKRHL
cleartext2 ENIGMA ciphertext2 JRHSCB
Solution: rotor 513 key TJB steckers ADNT cleartext ANSWER ciphertext YRKRHL
cleartext2 ENIGMA ciphertext2 IRLHUN
Solution: rotor 234 key UHH steckers AGJS cleartext ANSWER ciphertext YRKRHL
cleartext2 ENIGMA ciphertext2 XRNBIK
Solution: rotor 234 key UHH steckers AGKU cleartext ANSWER ciphertext YRKRHL
cleartext2 ENIGMA ciphertext2 XRNBIU
Solution: rotor 321 key ESM steckers AHFY cleartext ANSWER ciphertext YRKRHL
cleartext2 ENIGMA ciphertext2 BRDHAQ
Solution: rotor 125 key HMH steckers AHRU cleartext ANSWER ciphertext YRKRHL
cleartext2 ENIGMA ciphertext2 QRYFNZ
…
Download:
MD5: A9FEBBABA207E7C3790D075FD3A3D22B
Didier Stevens 