Alex Le’s Blog

I had a really good surprise today in my class, Cryptography. Prof. Yuen (amazing guy, extremely smart) invited an old guy who brought with him an Enigma Machine. This guy had actually borrowed the machine from a friend of his. He said that his friend bought the enigma machine for $25,000 a few years ago and it had been sitting in the storage for years before he borrowed it to demo for previous Crypto classes. Considering the small 25-pound wooden box and little rotors inside, 25 grands is quite a bit of money (I could have fund 1 and 1/2 yesr of college with that money!)

The machine was in very good condition. The rotors were working fine, the keyboard was in amazing condition. We didn’t test the light bulbs since the machine used a 4-volt battery. So the guy took apart the rotors and passed it arond the class. Those rotors must weigh at least 1 pound or no less. Suppossingly the circle on the rotor could be twisted but since the machine had been in storage for at least a year, the circle was stuck. After the presentation, we were allowed to play with the instrument for a bit (which is awesome!) This is probably once-in-a-lifetime change as who’d let anyone played on an antique item that cost at least 40 grand? Anyway, the keyboard was pretty heavy to type, imagine a crappy typewriter with keys that take one pound for each stroke. The rotor did rotated every stroke and the next rotor rotated every 26 strokes of the first stroke to facilitate the permutation of the characters. Hey, this is really an electro-mechanic encryption machine and it’s ubber cool!

Compared to the current standard of keysize, the Enigma keyspace for the 3-rotors is pretty lame. But it was some 60 or 80 years ago when hundreds of lives were actually dependent on the little box, it had some significant meanings to it. Now the enigma machine is no more enigmatic, it costs a fortune to have one of those babies. Incedentally, at the time of the presentation, a guy on Ebay was selling one similar machine. The bidding was around 24k but still “reserved-not-met”. The machine actually can easly worth 40 grands if not more.

Thanks to Prof. Yuen and his friend for letting me have this chance to experience the historic machine. It’s a blast! Last thing, I’d highly recommend taking a Cryptography course for anyone who’s interested in Computer Science. This is where real science is combined with real application. When does someone have a chance to study about DES, 3DES, AES, RSA, Public Key Exchange, Eliptical Curves? College! I’m blessed to be able to do it. But again, I cannot wait to graduate. 2 more days to the last day of my college career. 2 more weeks to commencement. See you there.