Cybersecurity

Encryption

Imitation game is directly correlated to cyber security through encryption. Encryption is a huge part of cyber security and something that people rely on heavily nowadays. Just some examples of how we rely on it is through secure messaging like WhatsApp and banking such as online banking portals, and Venmo. The privacy and security of your massages and money rely on encryption. Just like today encryption in the movie was used for "secure" Commnication. Except the communication was the nazis planning attacks against the Allied nations. Also, similarly to the modern world the Enigma machine messages were decrypted by Alan Turing, just as today many people still are able to break various different encryption strategies for modern technologies. This shows how Encryption is essential to cyber security in privacy but still isn't enough to ensure cyber security. Enigma was thought to be impossible to break then, but it was broken and now WhatsApp is thought to be impossible to break.

User Error and Cyber Security

The whole movie their big problem is that the machine just takes too long to go through all the Enigma settings. They were stuck technologically with nothing else they could do to speed up the machine to be fast enough to decode the Enigma settings within a day. But one day while Turing was at a bar, he realized something, which was that there was a message at 6am every morning that would follow a more predictable format and of course would end with "Hail Hitler". Because they consistently send "Hail Hitler" in these early morning weather reports, the enigma machine had more words to check against making it able to break the enigma in about 20 minutes every morning. This shows how even with the most secure systems like WhatsApp you can set bad passwords, disable security features, and just participate in other bad security habits that will allow people to much more easily invade your privacy, giving you little to no security protections. It might cost millions of dollars and years of work in the future to decrypt one WhatsApp message from the outside, but you could also for no money, just steal someone's unlocked phone and read all their WhatsApp messages. Making the end-to-end encryption useless if the user has no accountability for their own cyber security.