Rotor in Jython?

[brueckd at tbye.com]

On 3 Mar 2002, Paul Rubin wrote:

> <brueckd at tbye.com> writes:
> > But the sorry history of rotors has nothing to do with rotor strength and
> > everything to do with short/obvious keys, the obvious starting text of the
> > messages (e.g. "No news to report"), and the limitations of mechanical
> > implementations. You can *always* make a rotor stronger by increasing the
> > length of the key - and at no additional computational cost.
>
> That's erroneous--if you count the rotor and plugboard permutations,
> the WW2 Enigma machines had a very large key space (maybe larger than
> 56-bit DES) but they were cryptanalyzed with fairly crude
> electromechanical devices (the "Bombe" was basically 6 Enigmas wired
> together).

But still the cryptanalysis was feasible because there was a small number
of rotors and the messages had known text.  For example, the Turing Bombe
worked so well because the Germans routinely spelled out officer titles in
the messages.

Thanks for the interesting discussion. This thread is getting tired so
I'll let it die now. ;-)

-Dave