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After Weeks of Trying, UK Cryptographers Fail To Crack WWII Code
An anonymous reader writes "A dead pigeon discovered a few weeks ago in a UK chimney may be able to provide new answers to the secrets of World War II. Unfortunately, British cryptographers at the country's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have been unable to crack the code encrypting a message the bird was tasked with sending and say they are confident it cannot be decoded 'without access to the original cryptographic material.'"
My Aunt was a radio communication specialist in the channel islands where they communicated with the underground and later the anti Nazis within the third reich. My Dad was involved in counter espionage within Great Britton. They were both recruited by the Canadian military and then trained by the combined British and Canadian military intelligence division long before the US joined in.
Not only was key info done with one time cipher it also used specialist language. For instance the word pie after decryption might be construed to be to mean supplies. Only the individuals who were taught the language could decode it and no more than a few individual agents sending info from within Germany or France used the same code specific language.
If the pigeon corpse was from D Day then it would have been really early in the landing. As the beach head was secured the code receiving specialist people moved in to undisclosed places in Normandy. Are they absolutely certain the pigeon was from D Day? If not it may have been from other sources as my aunt told me there was some underground agents using them before 1944...Some even in the Dieppe region!
Now you're just making a fool of yourself. People already linked you to a wikipedia page that explains in detail why you're wrong, yet you stubbornly refuse to read it (or perhaps you're too daft to understand what it says?)
. .
Here's a demonstration. From TFA, the secret message is:
AOAKN HVPKD FNFJU YIDDC
RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX
PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH
NLXKG MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ
UAOTA . RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH
LKXGH RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ
KLDTS GQIRU AOAKN
My sources are telling me that "AOAKN" is most likely the identifier of the OTP or code page that was used, so the actual content of the message is
HVPKD FNFJU YIDDC RQXSR
DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX PABUZ
WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH NLXKG
MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ UAOTA
RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH LKXGH
RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ KLDTS
GQIRU
Being a 1337 cryptography expert, I determined that the code page in the sender's code book started with:
SBXDZ CUYSG ECWKO CMRSZ
JRGOH DIRFA JRWEP LFXRK
OLULB XHHAW UGKLL NUUKT
JQPKX LMUGR IGRCC AHKCW
OKMZZ LQOSK PPGNH YPPVW
NRVDT RNHYD CNCCY RUVJO
VCNNA
Don't believe me? Go to this page, copy-paste the above "actual content" in the field that says "input" and the key in the field that says "key", and click decode.
Oh wait, I was wrong, the real key is:
ZTLJV VJXRU VERZP YMUND
PYLYB WBHJV ZUWCR ESJNL
FMYUI KMCKU HWYID NIJTM
ZBITS VNBFI TGIWG MLKQS
RMQLD PWASI AHNAS LHFBN
PWYUN XRTPM MVDFU HXKMO
IUUAK
Allright, I'm just messing with you, it's
JHVGR QUHCQ YFZAC EILSG
YVTCW PABZG QALLG HVBDG
OLAZV LGLAS QJGWZ WHVRY
YROWQ XBAPU WTIEY UTOHI
YXZRU ALALV OPGXD USLCW
YSBDI GNILZ OWTSM TUMCB
PZANC
Actually I read something interesting about WWII One Time Pads. Apparently the pads were generated by women (typically) drawing ping pong balls out of a hopper and writing down the letters. The problem was if they drew the same letter multiple times in a row, they might put it back thinking that it wasn't "random" enough. Of course, in doing so they changed the distribution of letters to no longer be uniform. My understanding is that this very quickly erodes the cryptographic integrity of the one-time pad to the point where you can start to look for the plaintext based on letter frequency. I'm not saying that's applicable here (and I have to imagine the cryptographers would have looked at this) but interesting nonetheless.