Old school crypto

Recently I have begun coding a simple library that can encrypt/decrypt files based on the old enigma machines (and type-x etc).

But what fun is it to just digitize a known breakable piece of hardware?Technology has come far enough for us to hold way more computing power in the palm of our hands than a soldier was able to carry around on his back a few decades ago.

The first big improvement step is to switch the alphabet for bytes, which gives us a few distinct advantages:

  • Ability to process any file we want to
  • Still easily represented in a human readable form [0-255]
  • Bigger “rotors”, which means more possibilities
  • Easier comparisons programmatically

Also the following steps have been implemented to improve the strength based on the type-x and other ideas:

  • A byte can become itself!
  • A second switching board after the rotors
  • Configurable rotors (including stronger random generator)
  • Configurable number of rotors
  • Filler bytes which can only be removed when successfully decrypted
  • Random filler data before and after payload
  • Configurable hashing algorithm combined with length indicator
  • Ability to rotate more than one rotor after each character

As well as a few basic functions:

  • Import and export keys (XML and binary)
  • Proper file handling
  • Basic DLL calls

This should be more than enough to stop the attacks on the old enigma and should prevent most modern day crypt analysis.

The implementation is written in C# but should be easy to convert to other languages as well, keep in mind that given the large number of bytes a simple document has become and the amount of array operations required this will not be a great solution for large files (AMD X4 965 scores about 5MB/min). Which will obviously decrease as more steps are implemented, though I think there still are some optimizations that be done to simplify some operations.

The following points are on the bucket list:

  • Plugboards
  • Fully functional UI
  • Implement a configurable stepping maze (hard work, but should increase the entropy big time)
  • Better file deletion (first overwrite with random data, then delete the inode)
  • Release the source if there is some interest
  • Ability to encrypt/decrypt a continues stream
FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.