What was one of the greatest challenges of military cryptography at the time, today would be a piece of bread for artificial intelligence. The difficulties faced by Alan Turing and his team during World War II to break enigma, then considered indecipherable, would be reduced to nothing to the processing capacity of current systems.
And it is to solve those messages, which required months of work and huge resources, could now be resolved in a matter of minutes thanks to technology. Designed by the Nazi army to protect its communications, this device was an electromechanical tool that combined interchangeable rotors, an internal reflector and a connection board.
Each of these elements added a layer of complexity to the encryption, producing millions of possible combinations. However, its greatest strength was that the configuration changed daily, making practically unfeasible that the allies decipher their messages in time if they failed to replicate the exact system that, at the time, was almost impossible.
Despite the difficulty, advances in cryptography carried out by Polish mathematicians in the 30s and, later, by the Bletchley Park team in the United Kingdom – led by Turing -,, allowed to develop the first «bombs»machines to automate patterns analysis. With them, They managed to decipher Hitler’s communications and alter the course of war.
Of the «pumps» of Turing to artificial intelligence
The jump between those rudimentary machines and current systems is abysmal. Turing pumps were manually scheduled electromechanical devices to explore high speed combinations, but their capacity was limited. Today, well -designed software can replicate its logic in a digital environment and execute it millions of times faster.
Current AI models, such as those that already operate in natural language processing, would not only be able to simulate the internal enigma rules, but to apply combined gross force strategies and statistical analysis.
As experts in cybersecurity point out, as well as Michael Wooldridge, computer science and artificial intelligence specialist at the University of Oxford, England, even A basic simulation of these models, executed from an advanced data center, would far exceed what Turing achieved with the technology of his time. And I would do it in minutes.
It should be noted that despite his fame, The Nazi machine was not perfect, and one of its best known weaknesses was that no letter could encryp as itselfa limitation that reduced the number of possible combinations and facilitated the crossing of hypothesis. These weaknesses, together with predictable patterns in messages and repeated use of certain phrases, were key in their deciphering.
The current AI can exploit these regularities quickly, comparing linguistic patterns, testing parallel hypotheses and recognizing grammatical structures. What required work months today can be resolved with scheduled routines in minutes, executed on computer infrastructure with a difficult calculation capacity to conceive in 1930.
Although his system would seem fragile today, Enigma marked a turning point, and not only because he allowed the allies to anticipate key military movements, but because It was one of the catalysts for the development of modern computing.
The deciphering of the code was both a technical and human achievement: combined ingenuity, international cooperation and a new way of understanding information. Alan Turing not only designed machines; He planted the bases of what would become the basis decades later. Therefore, although today it would be a minor challenge from the technical point of view, its legacy is still valid.
What about current codes?
Unlike enigma, current encryption systems, such as RSA, They are designed to resist attacks even with current processing capacity. Based on mathematical principles such as the factorization of large prime numbers, their safety lies in computational problems that still do not have a known efficient solution.
However, some specialists warn that this strength could be threatened by the development of quantum computing, which promises to break the current schemes if it reaches advanced functional levels. It is for this reason that the history of the German machine remembers that No encryption technology is invulnerable forever.
What was at the time a cryptographic feat, Today it would be vulnerable to tools that we use dailyaccording to experts, but it does not lose its historical value, although it forces us to look forward. Because if something teaches the Enigma case, it is that computer security is not a destination, but a constant career against technological advancement.
Know How we work in NoticiasVE.
Tags: Artificial intelligence