Enigma@Home Cracks Nazi WW2 Enigma Message - Team Gridcoin Contributed just over 50% of all Computation.

The Nazi Enigma FTNBK message was officially deemed broken on September 15 2017, thanks to the efforts of the volunteers of the Enigma@Home project. This message was considered one of the easier messages to solve out of the remaining set currently being worked on, and leaves just 6 messages currently left to crack by the initiative: JBIYH, LXACA, VROLN, ALQFI, RXPBS and MVUEH. While the contents of FTNBK were nothing to get excited about, I hope that its solution will encourage more volunteers to join the search. The most notorious message, VROLN, still has several years of work left to run though every possible setting of the Enigma machine - we need your help!

Above is the original document depicting the FTNBK message, named after its first letter group. It was intercepted near the start of WWII, in July of 1941 and has remained unbroken despite several earlier brute force attempts, until the current hill climbing algorithm successfully returned the encryption settings:

Encrypted:

XNQAE QNZLW FMQYT XOQZV XJKBO JKPKI JQGMV FLSVJ BHRIY MRYWH UIVWY KXKAK FMSQF BBARN KNHBR HQHLI UVNEH MJKOZ RXLPL WISNZ Z

Key:

B:314:HV:FQR

Plugs:

AHCNDFEIKYMPOZRUSWVX

Plain Text:

STANDORT DER LNK X LNK X IST X KUSOW X KUSOW X SEQS X KM X SUEDWESTLIQ X SAGOSKA X SAGOSKA X KEINE AUSFAELLE X MATHIAT X MATHIAT

While we may have been hoping for the location of the missing Austrian Nazi gold train, an Antarctic submarine base, or similar, the German plain text actually translates to a far more standard communication:

Position of LNK is Kusow six km southwest Sagoska. No incidents. Mathiat.

LNK is an abbreviation for Leichte Nachschub-Kolonne, German for light supply convoy. KUSOW or KUSOV is a very small village southwest of another small place called SAGOSKA or ZAGOSKA. You can find both of these on the map below marked with 16 July (click the map for an enlarged version).

Finally, the signature appears to have been misspelt by the receiving radio officer (we know the message was incoming as opposed to outbound based on the colour of the original document). Mathiat refers to Obersturmführer Friedrich Mattiat, born 9 August 1909, SS-Nr: 327353.

To celebrate the cracking of this message, and encourage the effort to solve the illusive VROLN message, I will be awarding a 1000 GRC bounty to whomever cracks the VROLN message and has their solution verified by Frode Weierud. Lets stick it to the Nazi's one more time! Remember, even if you do not manage to crack the message yourself, you can be rewarded for your work by the Gridcoin network just for eliminating false key combinations. I personally earned around 30 thousand Gridcoin for my help in cracking the FTNBK message, which is about USD$1,200 at the current price of GRC. If you would like to get involved, you can install BOINC from here and join the Gridcoin pool here.

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Content Credit
-All open source from public war records