[Cryptography] Imitation Game: Can Enigma/Tunney be Fixed?

[Philip Gladstone]

On 1/6/15 03:54, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>
> On 01/05/2015 09:41 AM, Tony Arcieri wrote:
>
>> Enigma is fatally flawed in its current design, AFAIK. Due to the nature of
>> how its rotors operate, it can't encrypt a letter to itself, introducing a
>> statistical bias into the ciphertext.
>>
>> Enigma would need to be modified so all letters have equal probabilities.
>> Someone who knows the intricacies of these rotor machines better than me
>> might know what's involved.
> The Enigma actually had two fatal weaknesses.  First, as you
> correctly point out, the allies exploited the can't-map-to-
> itself property to great effect; t was how the Bombes
> eliminated possibilities in great quantities once they were
> started.
>
My impression was that the steckerboard did not significantly help 
against cryptanalysis (contrary to what the Germans thought). The 
closures (or cycles) that were used to drive the bombes were independent 
of the steckering.

Philip