Re: M4 project

Dear Tony and Faithful Readers of the BP Mailing List,

I can assure you that Hillclimbing Steckers work beautifully. Geoff
Sullivan and I have been hillclimbing the Enigma since 2003 and we have
broken more than 780 Enigma messages this way.

I am astonished that none of you seem to know about this as it has been
published a year ago and it even got coverage in the press, Sunday Times
etc.

You will find all details on our Web Portal, Breaking German Wehrmacht
Ciphers.
http://cryptocellar.org/bgac/

The M4 message Ralph Erskine discovered he found in the PRO, now The
National Archives, in Kew, London.

I can also reveal that the M4 Message Breaking Project has broken their
second M4 message. It has the same wheel order as the first one but
different Stecker connections.

Best wishes,
	Frode

        Frode Weierud           Phone  : +41 22 7674794
        CERN, AB,               Fax    : +41 22 7679185
        CH-1211 Geneva 23,      E-mail : [email protected],
        Switzerland                      [email protected] 
                                WWW    : http://home.cern.ch/frode/
                                         http://cryptocellar.org
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bletchley Park discussion 
> [mailto:BLETCHLEYPARK-0lvw86wZMd/[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tony Sale
> Sent: Tuesday, 07 March, 2006 12:36
> To: BLETCHLEYPARK-0lvw86wZMd/[email protected]
> Subject: [BPARK] M4 project
> 
> Dear All, I thought you might be interested in this:
> 
> The M4 project.
> 
> I was made aware of this project by an email from David Crick 
> on 26th February and I looked at the M4 Message Breaking 
> Project web site.
> 
> The project is to break and decipher some previously unbroken 
> 1945 U Boat messages found by Ralph Erskine in the American 
> National Archive
> (NARA) in Washington.
> 
> One of the four messages has so far been broken.
> 
> The method suggested is a brute force attack on the complete 
> Wheel order, Wheel starts and Steckers search space using 
> deciphered letter frequencies. The search space to be 
> partitioned up on a very large number of private PCs.
> 
> My immediate concern on reading about the attack strategy was 
> that it depended on "hill climbing" on Steckers.  I am not 
> convinced that this is possible.
> 

Etc. etc.

> 
> regards--
> Tony Sale
>