Transmigrated as the Crown Prince

"His Royal Highness the Crown Prince."

Hedy Lamarr's voice was so soft and crisp that it seemed to make people's bones feel numb.

"Miss Heidi, how's the scientific research project going?" Yannick got straight to the point. Other men might try to win over women with some sweet talk and sweet talk; but with his current status, he can completely skip these steps. As long as he wants to, there will be a large group of women lining up to court him, maybe that long Can circle the earth.

Heidi smiled brightly. “With the current progress, we will be able to enter the practical stage by the end of the year.”

"Great." Yannick waved to the waiter not far away, brought a glass of champagne and handed it to Heidi. "That means that starting next year, our communications will become a black hole that the enemy cannot eavesdrop on!" Compared with fixed-frequency communications, frequency-hopping communications are more concealed and difficult to intercept. As long as the other party does not know the rules of carrier frequency hopping, it will be difficult to intercept our communication content.

Heidi's face looked a little unnatural. "Your Highness, you also know that practicality does not mean that it can be popularized. I am afraid that it is a bit reluctant to popularize it to the division level."

"..." Yannick smacked his lips in frustration. "That means the grassroots level still has to use Enigma machines."

Friends who have watched the American blockbuster "U-571" all know that the "Enigma" cipher machine was a cutting-edge secret that the Allies tried their best to obtain during the war, and was the key to defeating German naval submarines. This is indeed the case in history. For submarine operations, especially the German Navy's "Wolf Pack" tactics, radio communication is the most important means for submarines to obtain information and report situations during their activities at sea, and the "Enigma" cipher machine It is a device related to the security of the entire radio communication, and its importance can be imagined.

The "Enigma" cipher machine that appeared in the movie looks like a box filled with complex and delicate components at first glance. At first glance, it looks somewhat similar to a typewriter.

It uses a compound letter replacement encryption method, using keyboards, rotors, jumpers, reflectors, and displays for symmetric encryption/decryption. When you press any letter on the keyboard, the letter will be converted into another letter through the keyboard-rotor-jumper-reflector-display.

For example, when A is typed for the first time, light bulb B lights up, the rotor rotates one space, and the password corresponding to each letter changes. When you type A for the second time, the corresponding letter may become C; similarly, when you type A for the third time, the light bulb D may turn on. ——This is the key to why "Enigma" is difficult to decipher. It is not a simple substitution code. The same letter can be replaced by different letters in different positions in the plaintext, and the same letter in different positions in the ciphertext can represent different letters in the plaintext. The letter frequency analysis method has no use here. This encryption method is called "complex substitution cipher" in cryptography.

Enigma is an encryption method that separates algorithms and keys. The difficulty of cracking Enigma lies in not knowing the current key, including the initial position of the rotor and jumper settings. For daily use, the configuration of the Enigma can be via a codebook, agreed upon in advance and encrypted and transmitted using the previous day's key.

The German army evaluated the use of the "Enigma" cipher machine and believed that the cipher machine was easy to carry, easy to use, and more importantly, extremely secure. For the enemy, even if it has a cryptographic machine, it will still be unable to decipher it if it cannot master the keys composed of the three lines of defense at the same time. Colonel Erich Folgibel, Chief of Communications of the German High Command, believes that the "Enigma" will be the most perfect communications device for the German Wehrmacht blitzkrieg.

Therefore, from the German high command to the army, navy and air force, the "Enigma" is widely used as the standard standard cipher machine. ——The Germans had every reason to believe that they had mastered the most advanced and secure communication encryption system in the world at that time, which was an unbreakable cipher system.

However, placing such foolish trust in machines will only end up suffering the consequences of the machines.

The first people to crack Enigma were the Poles. They managed to get a commercial Enigma machine (usually used by the military as a commercial Enigma machine. The Germans were really confident in their own encryption technology) After several years of hard work, two Polish mathematicians and a group of assistants finally succeeded in deciphering 75% of the "Enigma" cipher message at the end of 1937.

However, the German military improved the "Enigma" and increased it to five rotors. The Poles were unable to defeat the Germans' new "Enigma" aircraft until the eve of World War II.

The extremely foresighted Polish Intelligence Agency knew that Poland would definitely fall. In order to resist the common cause of Germany, they decided to send their "Enigma" cipher machine and relevant research materials to the United Kingdom and France, pinning their hopes of defeating Hitler in Europe. on these two powerful countries.

The UK attaches great importance to the solutions provided by Poland and has even expanded its cryptographic team for information security.

Room 40 of the former Cryptozoological Bureau was moved to Bletchley Park, and the area expanded dozens of times; the number of staff expanded from more than 20 people at the beginning to more than 9,000 people five years later.

At the same time, the structure of the workforce has also changed. In the past, it was mainly linguists, but now the main force is mathematicians. Recruiting mathematicians in large numbers was something the Poles specifically ordered the British to do.

Everyone knows what happened after that. Although Alan Turing admired the wisdom of the Poles, he realized that the Polish cracking method relied too much on the German loopholes. Later, the German army upgraded the Enigma machine, and this cracking method subsequently Invalid. So Turing pursued a more direct and violent cracking method: machine versus machine. If the Poles were taking advantage of loopholes in the enemy's defenses to conduct a surprise paratrooper attack, then what Turing wanted was more like a frontal confrontation with an infantry division. The cryptographic monsters created by machines can only be defeated by machines. The human task is simply to design the working principle of the machine and optimize the amount of calculations required by the machine.

On March 14, 1940, the first Turing "bomb" was put into use at Bletchley Manor. Soon, it successfully deciphered the first Enigma code intelligence. When Winterbotham personally presented this intelligence to Air Force Intelligence Director Medhurst, he excitedly said: "From now on, the Germans' top-secret intelligence is a completely readable book for us. "

The Enigma code gradually became the most lethal weapon in the hands of the British. In later decisive military operations such as the Battle of El Alamein, the capture of Sicily, and the Normandy landings, both the British and the Allied forces took the initiative on the battlefield in time by deciphering the Enigma code, which gradually tilted the balance of victory and defeat. Allied side.

Of course Yannick would not make such a stupid mistake again. Although Alan Turing is now in Germany, he could not guarantee whether there would be anyone else in the UK who could crack the Enigma cipher machine, so he tried every means to improve it. Enigma machine, increasing the difficulty of cracking.

Heidi asked. "Your Highness, have I completed my mission?"

Yannick smiled. "Of course, you have done a great job, and I will naturally not break your promise. But the scenes of this movie will be very grand, and it is impossible to start shooting at this time. We have to wait until the war is over."