A graduate of the Cambridge master of engineering science Hal Evans has managed to build a fully functional replica of the Electromechanical cryptological device known as a “cyclometer Raevskogo”. He was the predecessor of the “Bombe”, which Alan Turing during the Second World war managed to break the encryption machine of the Nazis “Enigma”. Other cyclometers Raevskogo not existed for 80 years, all existing examples were destroyed in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. Polish mathematics, which together with Rejewski worked on the project managed to pass in the UK only the technology, but not the devices themselves.

By modern standards cyclometer very complex and inefficient expensive to produce a car as there is no digital technology, only analog mechanisms. And because most researchers were limited to software emulators, but Evans still in my fourth year of University I was fascinated by the works of Marian Raevskogo and came up with the idea to build his cyclometer. At Cambridge he was supported and even funded because the technology Rajewski formed the basis of Alan Turing, a graduate of the same University.

Turing has gone down in history as the Creator of the “Bombe” machine to crack the German encryption device Enigma. In reality, encryption algorithms “Enigma” appeared long before the “Bombe”and the Polish mathematicians had a few years to study them and to develop methods of deciphering. In fact, they first did it, but the Germans learned about their successes and complicated code, and then already during the war, began a fierce race – one all the time trying to crack the code, other upgraded.

Raevski among the first to understand the vulnerability of the Enigma code that depended on the starting position of the rotors. However, there were more than 100,000 variants. The developers of the Enigma came from the fact that people just can’t handle that amount of data, so Rejewski made a breakthrough, creating a prototype device for rapid and automatic decoding. Its design is constantly changing as the modernization of the code and Enigma, and in the end cyclometric never went beyond the laboratories cryptanalysis. The harder it was Hal Evans to build in the twenty-first century a car – but he did it.


Source — Cambridge