The M4 Message Breaking Project
I recently read about the “M4 Message Breaking Project“, which is a distributed computing experiment being done to crack some previously-undeciphered messages transmitted by the German military during World War II. The messages were encrypted by one of the “Enigma” encoding machines, which the Germans thought were unbreakable, but which the Allies secretly had cracked soon after they went into widespread use. During the period of time between the use of the “M3″ encryption machine and the much more robust “M4″ device, there was a period of time during which the Allies were unable to translate the messages the Germans were sending. The M4 Project has 6 messages believed to be from this time period and is using “borrowed” computer time on a number of PCs and Macs around the world to decode these historical messages.
So far, the project has cracked one of the 6 messages, which was a message from German U-boat commander Hartwig Looks of U-264, indicating that he had been forced to submerge during an attack due to the enemy’s use of depth charges. The message also provided the last known coordinates of the enemy vessel.
The current message been analyzed by the project has not yet been decoded as of this writing, though several passes over the “decoding space” have been made.
I’m currently running the client on my home PCs when they’re not doing anything else for me. They’ve contributed a number of “chunks” of analysis to the project already, with more delivered every few minutes/hours.
If you’re interested in contributing some of your own computers’ time to the project, all you need to do is download the client software, install it, and let it set to work. The client software is quite well behaved. It will generally only consume computing resources when your system isn’t doing something else, so you don’t tend to notice that it’s running your CPU at full-tilt.