Hurry up, you still have 5 hours to participate in the sale at Ebay as the BetaNews reported "eBay has long been a purveyor of the unusual and the unique, but it's not often an authentic piece of tech history captures as much attention as the Enigma 3 portable cipher machine that has racked up bids of almost 16,000 euros. The Enigma device was used extensively by Nazi Germany during World War II."
The Enigma machine was a key success factor for the Germans during WWII, until of course its messages started getting deciphered, it's great someone managed to preserve and resell one. Today's situation is entirely different, namely an average Internet user can easily encrypt data achieving military standards with the use of public tools, where Phil Zimmerman's PGP has been cause troubles for governments across the world since its release.
However, what the majority of end users don't realize is the how the keys lenght and the passphrase's quality means totally nothing when law enforcement is sometimes empowered to use spyware, and that quantum cryptography is also subject to attacks. Client side attacks and social engineering ones don't take into consideration any key lenght -- just naivety. In one of my previous posts "Get the chance to crack unbroken Nazi Enigma ciphers"
I mentioned about the existence of a distributed project to crack unroken nazi ciphers you can freely participate into. Being a total paranoid in respect to my favorite SetiATHome, you should also consider the possibility of a SETI Hacker -- which partly happened in Contact in case you reckon.
Technorati tags :
Cryptography, Encryption, Enigma