Enigma

Peter Wayner writes: "In all of the scary stories Hollywood circulates about copyright piracy, nothing could be scarier that the gang of file swapping, copyright circumventing hackers in the new movie 'Enigma'. They laugh and love a bit, but mainly they spend their time building a big whirring and clicking machine to smash a copyright protection mechanism. When the machine delivers, they put the results into a Gnutella-like file sharing system called Ultra so their friends can track down the original artists and kill them." (Read on for the rest of Peter's review.)

Ooops. Wrong generation and wrong spin. "Enigma" is about good codebreakers -- the mathematicians and clerks of Great Britain's Bletchley Park who helped the Allied cause during World War II by breaking the German coding machine known as "Enigma." It's a wonderful story that's been told as non-fiction several times before by serious historians. This time around, the former newspaper columnist Robert Harris created a thinly fictionalized novel filled with composite characters based on reality. While the result is not factually perfect, it is close enough to capture the dangerous era. Abandoning the literal truth also allowed him to build a richly plotted yarn that evolves cleanly and smoothly.

The film closely follows the novel, although it does eliminate a few of the more subtle complexities. It was wildly popular in Britain when it was released there last year, probably because the story is told with gorgeously detailed sets dressed with nostalgia for a time of British patriotism and success. The film's costumes are lavish, the extras are everywhere, and the look is close enough to reality that the best complaint one ex-translator stationed at Bletchley Park could offer was that the canteen in the film was much nicer. Even Mick Jagger, one of the film's producer, couldn't resist the spirit and gave himself a cameo appearance as an officer relaxing in a club.

This film could represent the cultural high point for codeslinging nerds and other Slashdot types. Jagger produced this film with another cultural icon, Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michaels. If you secretly spend your days dreaming of strutting around the stage like Mick Jagger, you can now take some pride in the fact that Mick Jagger spent at least a few days dreaming of playing a code geek. And why not? According to one of the characters, the women go weak in the knees when they get to talk to codebreakers like the protagonist, Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott).

This movie is about sex and mathematics and the crucial satisfaction that comes from understanding the depth of their power. The two main threads of the film track Tom Jericho's search for 1) a missing lover (Saffron Burroughs) and 2) a new way to break the Germans' four rotor, Naval Enigma system known as Shark. His lover may have been mixed up in Germany's sudden decision to abandon the old codes and all of this must be untangled or else the war could be lost. Tom Stoppard, the screenwriter also responsible for Shakespeare In Love, weaves these two threads together with car chases, kissing, train whistles, moonlit nights, illicit file swapping and a few other romantic chords.

It seems like a lot of things happen in four days, but we must remember that this plays out in an era when people weren't couch potatoes taught that ignoring advertising is forbidden. The pacing is the biggest problem with the film because there's too much action packed into 117 minutes, leaving some transitions a bit confusing. The jumps are often too quick and in some places it's hard to know when the flashbacks begin and end.

Despite that, there's much for a geek to love in this movie. Both the Enigma machine and the cryptanalytic attack developed by the British are described in fairly good detail. We learn, perhaps too quickly, that much of the game is finding a crib, a term the codebreakers used to refer to a word or phrase that must be somewhere in the scrambled message. A weather broadcast, for instance, would include the word "rainy" on a wet day and the codebreakers would examine the possible combinations that might produce that word. That was one weakness the folks at Bletchley Park were able to exploit before Jericho's girlfriend disappeared.

Some of the other mathematical details are accurate but not explained in enough detail to be easily understood. Once the crib was identified, the codebreakers relied heavily on the fact that the Enigma machine could not encode one letter into itself. This weakness allowed them to eliminate many of the potential cribs quickly. Then they spent their time looking for potential "loops" in the coding. In a simple case, a loop is formed when the letter A is encoded as an R and a few letters later, an R is encoded as an A. Most of the loops are a chain of several letters strung out in an odd combination. This pencil-and-paper work by the codebreaker is turned over to a big machine that uses the loops to eliminate many of the potential positions of the rotors. The rest are tested quickly with plenty of whirring and clicking. On a good day, and there were many of them, the right settings for the rotors popped out and let the Allies read the encrypted traffic.

You get to see all of this in action, although the film does not describe much of it in the hopes of sparing those unanointed with the knee-weakening, code smashing gene. It's not really fair for me to concentrate on the machines and ignore the actors because most of the movie revolves around the emotional battles for the characters and their conflicting desires. These passions are well-constructed and intelligently arranged. Dougray Scott plays the mathematician with enough dash and sophistication while Kate Winslet fills out the role of the mousey clerk and co-conspirator. The real star is Jeremy Northam, who plays a sophisticated Foreign Office spy with the right amount of oily charm. He, like everyone else in this movie, is fighting a private little war which may or may not fit in with the larger battle between the Allied and Axis forces.

Some of these battles are so crucial to the plot that it's impossible to comment on them without spoiling the ending. For this reason, I'm including several links for you to click after seeing the movie ( first, second, and third.) as well as a sentence encrypted with an Enigma simulator:

FBZ DDE NZA DJN PNI POH YBF NJR QFP DDZ TVP IHN YSJ IXX UAH YXF BZT ZXW BXS GES GYD IFO VXQ KHU LMA SYX YEG MGK

Using Enigma as a digital rights management device is not new-- Harris includes an encrypted dedication in the novel-- but it raises an interesting question: Is the movie and its detailed description of breaking the Enigma in violation of the DMCA? Is the extra detail in the movie just a cookbook for those who want to pirate the sentence I encrypted above? If so, should I be able to shut it down? While some reviewers may dream of writing something so powerful that it closes a movie immediately, I would hate to do it to this one. It's a pretty, nostalgic thriller that makes a good date movie--especially if you happen to be a knee-weakening, codebreaking type.

---

Peter Wayner's latest books are Disappearing Cryptography, an exploration about how to disguise information and Translucent Databases, a practical description of how to use encryption algorithms to protect sensitive information like credit cards and medical records. If they ever get made into a movie, he wants to be played by Keanu Reeves -- the one who played Ted "Theodore" Logan, not the one who played Neo.

Another book on the topic...

[lord_dragonsfyre]

... is, of course, Stephenson's much-loved Cryptonomicon.

I can't help thinking, though, that as much as many of us love to make the comparison, no court in America would accept that cracking enemy cyphers falls under the DMCA.

Peace,

James Vogel.

National Cryptologic Museum has an Enigma

[dwheeler]

If you're interested in cryptography, and you can get to Maryland (USA), visit the National Cryptologic Museum [nsa.gov]. Among other things, they have an Enigma there. If you can't go and visit yourself, here's their picture and a short description of the Enigma [nsa.gov]. They have lots of other exhibits too, and there's no entrance fee. Last time I visited, they even let you play with an Enigma, so you could encrypt and decrypt messages with it.

Alan Turing

[gwernol]

My biggest concern about the movie, which I haven't yet had the chance to see, is that it seems to miss out the role of Alan Turing. Turing, for those who don't know, was one of the founders of computing. He lead the team that built one of the first digital computers and developed the theoretical foundation for all of modern computing. He is an absolutely key figure in 20th. century science, perhaps as important as Einstein.

He was also a leading figure at Bletchely Park and it is highly doubtful that Enigma would have been broken without him. If you were to single out one figure as the key to breaking the code it has to be Turing.

So its worrying that a film of this critical moment in world history seems to muddy [cryptographic.co.uk] the role of Turing. Andrew Hodges who wrote the review I link to, wrote an excellent biography [amazon.com] of Turing that should be required reading for anyone who considers themselves even remotely a geek. Turing achieved more in his sadly shortened life than most of us could dream of. The fact that the story of Bletchley Park has been turned into a film that excludes Turing is truly sad.

Re:interesting approach

[lildogie]

Charles invented the stored-program computer, but Blechley Park built the first electronic one. Theirs predated ENIAC, but it was secret, so the ENIAC builders thought they were first. See "The Code Book" by Simon Singh.

Re:NAZI's and DMCA

[peddrenth]

The original codebreaking was never in question here, the author's point is:

One of the uses to which this movie can be put is to decode something which the reviewer used to copy-protect his work. (remember, the infringing use does not have to be the primary use of a circumvention device)

With a copy of this movie, I would be able to do something illegal (i.e. read and copy a paragraph of encrypted text) which would not be otherwise possible.

Now, everyone check your browser settings. If it caches any pages, I'm suing you all for copying this post.

Re:interesting approach

[dunstan]

Bollocks. The computers used *were* invented at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing invented the Bombes, and Tommy Flowers invented Colossus. And this was all years before Eniac BTW. But history missed out on this, because Churchill had everything from Bletchley Park destroyed at the end of the war - presumably to stop it from possible falling into Stalin's hands.

Dunstan

William Tutte

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a story [theglobeandmail.com] about William Tutte who also worked at Bletchley, but he worked on breaking FISH. I went to what was probably his last lecture, about three months ago.

Re:Another book on the topic...

[gosand]

Not to mention Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but it is sitting on my shelf just begging to be read. I have heard it is good.

There is also a good chapter or two on the Enigma cracking in The Code Book by Simon Singh.

The review of this movie that I saw said it was good, but not quite what it could have been, considering how incredible the actual story was.

Re:Role of the Poles

[Anonymous Coward]

The Poles are mentioned briefly at the beginning. They provided an Enigma machine for Bletchley.

Re:Another book on the topic...

[RapaNui]

I found 'Codebreakers - the inside story of Bletchley Park" (Hinsley & Stripp) pretty good.
It is best read in concert with the Enigma chapters in Singh's 'The Code Book', though, as they leave the technical description of Enigma 'till fairly late in the book,
so in some of the early chapters you have _no_ idea what they're talking about until you skip forward a bit.

Tom Stoppard, playwright

[extra88]

He's written for multiple media but I think he is still considered primarily a playwright. He is probably best known for his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It's a good sign to see his name on a writing credit.

I found a decent page about his various works. A Tom Stoppard Bibliography [geocities.com]

Babbage did not invent the computer

[Ashurbanipal]

WIAKywbfatw [slashdot.org] wrote:

Oh, and by the way, the code breakers at Bletchley Park didn't invent the computer - Charles Babbage did that a great many years earlier.

No, the computer was invented long before Babbage. We know from the Ankythera [etl.uom.gr] Mechanism [sunysb.edu] that at least one computer existed circa 87 BC [upenn.edu]. There is historical evidence to suggest that other, more complicated mechanical computers were built by the ancients; but the Ankythera device is the oldest extant machine. You can't play Quake on it, but it's still a computer.

Wrong URL for the movie website

[Kazir]

> The film closely follows the novel, although
The link here incorrectly points to:
http://www.enigmathemovie.com/

The correct link is:
http://www.enigma-themovie.com/ [enigma-themovie.com]

Thanks Google! [google.com]

the real story

[KingPrad]

If they had done their homework better they would know the Engima was broken by a lone polish mathematician. Only when Poland was invaded did Poland tell other countries they had been reading the code for years. Up till then, no one had believed it possible.

The British then set up the team to extend the work and deal with the increasing complexity of the Enigma machines. Yes, they made awesome breakthroughs, but the Polish did the basic work much earlier.