Breaking Enigma With the Power of Modern C++
During the Second World War, Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park used a very primitive computer to crack the German Enigma machine encryption and allow the Allies to read the Axis secret communications. To achieve this feat they used every trick in the book to reduce the problem to something that could be achieved by an early 1940s electro-mechanical computer.
What if we were nowhere as smart, but got readily access to a 16 cores 2020s CPU and modern C++?
In this talk, we will show a brief history of Enigma's design and cryptoanalysis at the time, and then will try to see if we can break it using a modern machine and some C++20. How many combinations can we try per second using all our cores and with the help of some micro-benchmarking?
Mathieu Ropert
French C++ expert working on (somewhat) historical video games. Decided to upgrade his compiler once and has been blogging about build systems ever since. Past speaker at CppCon, Meeting C++ and ACCU. Used to run the Paris C++ User Group. Currently lives in Sweden.