Hacker News Reader

That's no enigma. enigma had 3 or 4 rotors. This is more like a "tunny", almost. Germany's teleprinter encryption, what you hear about that was decrypted at Bletchly Park, was a machine that had 12 rotors. This picture looks like a machine with 10 rotors.

TL;DR: this thing probably has significantly stronger encryption than enigma.

View on HN

The Crypto Museum in the Netherlands has one.[1] They also have most of the accessories, including the test unit. It's a rotor machine, considerably more advanced than the Enigma. Among other things, it has a "magic" circuit, using very early Soviet transistors. which fixes the problem with reflector-type rotor machines that prevents encoding a character into itself. That creates an exploitable vulnerability.

[1] https://cryptomuseum.com/crypto/fialka/psu/tempest.htm

Reply on news.ycombinator.com