Slashdot Mirror
Crypto Show on the History Channel Tonight (9/12)
aegrumet writes "The History Channel is doing a show tonight at 9pm EDT on WW2 crypto called "The Ultra Enigma". The blurb on their program listing reads "British codebreaking and capture of the German military's super cipher machine, the Enigma, enabled the Allies to pull off one of the greatest campaigns of deception in military history, and changed the course of World War II." This will be especially interesting to those who, like me, are reading or have recently finished Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon. "
I visted bletchley park and they had alot of but not much money
to their credit they had set out alot of old machines !
and no you DID NOT JUST LOOK you can play with them touch them and pick them up they had examples of puch card mainframes which you may use also they had all the code machines and explained all the maths very well
this was all done by volenteers
this is because BT (the largest telco in UK and right up their with AT&T for size and profits)and they most greedy !!
had part of the site they have had to give it up as it now preserved for us all but they had wanted to turn it into an exchange and help center
but now they need money
please visit them and see for yourself if you are in the uk @ any time they are very open but like I said they are volenteers
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
have fun
john
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
Interesting!
I've always heard that the CIA was rather surprised by the events at the end of the cold war (and their threat estimates just prior to that time tend to show that too.)
Breaking a code is great, unless the enemy knows you've broken it, in which case it's a perfect channel for disinformation. Given that there was a mole fairly high in the CIA back then, it's not inconceivable that the Soviets knew, and took advantage to appear stronger than they were.
I hope there is a documentary about that period like this one about WWII someday.
Or do US cryptography laws prevent the export of shows like this?
:wq
"I simply can't grasp the concept that you could do cryptography without computers. "
The people at Bletchley Park couldn't do it without computers either. So they designed and built computers to help them. The machines that they built were truly astonishing. They were, in modern terms, massively parallel processors. They pushed I/O performance to ridiculous levels using paper tape, and broke the strongest ciphers in the world at that time fast enough that the information still had tactical value when decrypted.
Having Alan Turing on the project helped. He must go down in history as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentith century.
Everyone in the Western world owes an awful lot to the people who worked on code breaking at Bletchley in the Second World War.
The people who risked (and often lost) their lives bringing information about the German's cryptographic technology also played a vital role. I am very glad they did what they did.
It puts the "My OS is better than your OS" arguments in perspective, doesn't it?
It should be possible to run a more advanced heuristic than leftmost-nonblack-pixel to get better results. There are only three positions to choose from for each scanline.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Hold on. This story covers some of the early codebreakers using the German "double dice" method of encryption, which was not the Nazi inspired Enigma machine. But this article gets the facts right on the listening post at Uzes, which was set up to intercept certain local radio messages still using double dice, since the enigma machines were too valuable for every Nazi unit in the field to have one. The old-time commanders in the field just kept using what they knew from the 1920s.
The real Polish involvement in Enigma started in 1936, when the Nazis were using forced labor in a factory southeast of Berlin to manufacture the wheels and typewriter keyboards. There was heavy security which piqued the interest of the Polish secret service, and there just happened to be several germans of Polish descent working in the factory (the border between Germany and Poland moved many times over the last few centuries). Those workers were considered to be good germans by the Nazis, since they never spoke a word of Polish which would have led to their execution.
The Polish secret police played on the loyalty to the Polish cause with some of the workers, and they basically sketched out every piece of the enigma machine. The only part missing was the actual wiring of the wheels, which was done in another secret plant (not stupid, these crypto people). With the invasion in 1938, the Polish security services fled to other parts of Europe to escape the special Gestapo teams sent to hunt them down. There were 3 teams sent out with their copies of the plans of Enigma, one group piloted a ship from near Gdansk to Scotland, where they were captured and held as Nazi spies. Eventually the Brits figured out they were Poles, and got the plans to Bletchley Park. [I got the story of the escape first hand from one of the participants. He didn't know at the time what was so important, his group of resistance fighters were assigned to get a handful of people to England "at all costs". There were also some members of the royal family and a government minister, and their safety was considered "secondary". Basically they stole a fishing boat, traveled at night, hid the boat in swedish/norwegian coves each day, and eventually made north Scotland. Later they were all moved to Canada, and after the war he settled in Ireland.]
Once Turing and company were able to see exactly how the system physically worked, they went back and found a few test transmissions some poor fool in the field sent to his buddy. Those copies of the plain text and the crypto text (plus several attempts of sending the starting wheel positions in the clear) enabled them to figure out the wiring.
Colossus was built to figure out the starting wheel positions, since it changed each day based on either a OTP or other pre-arranged sequence. Each pair or group of Enigma stations maintained their own keys and key distribution scheme.
Thats the Polish story as it relates to Enigma. They didn't break it, but they certainly knew the value of it. Bletchley couldn't have broken it without the physical plans.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
That program isnt new, its been on the history channel several times, and I must admit - it is well worth the watch. Ill have to see it for the 3rd time, as I only remember brief bits of it. *sigh* memory isnt what it used to be. Judg3
*******
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
I've seen the same subject covered on Nova. I often get the idea that programs on the History Channel and Discovery Channel are programs produced by PBS, BBC, CBC, etc, re-done with a different sound track, but working from the same video and research notes as were used to put together the original for the non-commercial broadcaster. Anybody know howcome so much similarity between what is on PBS and what later shows up on these trailing-edge, recycled-news, low-budget, high-profit commercial cable operations?
Yeah that one has been on before. Anyone who is even slightly interested in cryptography should tune it. Really gives you a good understanding about how cryptography all got started - building up from sending passwords back and forth with simple keys all the way up to sophisticated encryption machines, and about the entire behind the scenes crypto-war that was going on in WW2.
"The voices in my head say crazy things"
Whenever I see topics like this (um, history) I can't help but wonder what the History Channel will be doing specials on in like ten or twenty years...
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
"Rise and Fall of an Empire: The Microsoft Story"
"The Penguin Cronicles: Why the Inter(pla)net runs Linux"
Or mebbe I'll just be watching the SlashDot channel...
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
If you're ever in the DC area, see the Enigma machine at the National Cryptologic Museum. Here's the page for the map...http://www.nsa.gov.8080/museum/map.html
According to TV Guide (which I visit religiously, and I'm not religious):
Sworn to Secrecy: The Ultra Enigma
A look at British efforts to break Germany's 'Enigma' code in World War II, which enabled the Allies to defend against the Luftwaffe and locate and destroy marauding U-boats. Also: the manpower employed to decipher codes. Narrated by Charlton Heston.
Rating: TV-G
Category: Other, documentary
Originating Country: United States
It causes my brain to hurt talking to him. He doesn't understand computers, so computer terms like "disk drive" are complete gibberish to him. On the other hand, words like "cipher-text", "one-time-pad", and other cryptography terms are perfectly natural for him. I simply can't grasp the concept that you could do cryptography without computers.
He has a lot of interesting annecdotes. For example, the Germans thought they had a machine that produced a one-time-pad, but the codebreakers found it repeated over a long cycle. Cracking security today is no different: find accidental weaknesses left behind by the engineers.
Churchill didn't withhold Ultra stuff to accelerate our entry into the war, he withheld it because it was the single most secret secret on the planet. Churchill more than once allowed Britich troops to die to hide the fact that Ultra could read Enigma transmissions, when they thought the Germans would deduce that the only way for the Brits to have known something was codebreaking. Every bit of intel ever released from Ultra had a cover from some other intel source. In fact, hiding Ultra decodes as intercepted paper, first hand leaks, etc was a major part of British Intelligence work during WWII A useful side effect of this was that the Nazi counterintelligence program spent much of the war chasing non-existent spies.
Have a look at: http://www.polamjournal.com/library/enigma.html Enigma machines were stolen from Germans by polish secret service.
I was in the U.S. a few years ago stuck in my hotel room with the usual assortment of boring cable channels. I was zapping around and found a presentation to congress by some crypto expert about the breaking of the enigma cypher, and why it was necessary to keep all crypto out of enemy hands. It covered it all, including the role of the Polish inteligence agency, and the fact that they all spent the rest of the war in Canada in a special POW camp after giving the Brits a crude copy of the enigma machine.
The most frustrating part was that the camera work was obviously directed to not show any of his notes flashing up on the board behind him. There were a few glances from other cameras showing the inner workings of an enigma machine, as well as the math used to find the initial wheel position. The talk was absolutely interesting, since it was un-edited, but I was dying to see the slides as well. I had to leave before the talk was over (it ran at least 2 hours).
If anybody can find a tape of that lecture, it was pretty interesting. I remember that they never announced the name of the speaker during the whole show, but they were showing the name of the sub-commitee.
There was also a bit about why crypto is good for the U.S. spy agencies, and why it is bad for everyone else. The usual tripe discussed to death on slashdot, and this guy was even squirming talking about it. Just his job on the line, I guess.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
The Japanese military used their own ciphers, Ultra for the army, and JN25 for the navy. A major problem associated with the breaking the Japanese code was that the language itself; various words take on different meaning dependent on how it is used (more complicated than English).
Enigma get the majority of interest by the popular press. Historians are now realizing that breaking Enigma was not as significant in stopping the u-boats as we were once led to believe. However, the breaking of JN25 was very important as indicated by the battle of Midway.
Two good sources of further informtation:
David Kahn's book (considered the definitive reference on cryto through the end of WWII):
The Codebreakers
David Kahn
ISBN 0-02-560460-0
MacMillan Publishing Company
(c) 1967
and a newer book (and interesting story):
Between Silk and Cyanide - A Codemaker's War
Leo Marks
ISBN 0-684-86422-3
The Free Press
(c) 1998
Both can be found at your favorite library or book seller.
According to Bit by Bit (good book, by the way) the race to crack Enigma led them to create Colossus. Somehow, the creators of Colussus came to the US to see von Neumann's EDVAC. The group then went back to England where Turing, studying notes on the EDVAC, proceded to invent the first fully electronic stored program computer ever. At that point Great Britain stole the lead in computing technology. They went on to develop EDSAC while the US stalled on a patent fight over ENIAC.
FUD anyone?
My god, Neal Stephenson has really hit the mark hasn't he? Not only has he gotten you kids to read his fat book but he's gotten you interested in history too! Some time in the future you may find yourself being drawn towards a big building called a "Library".. they have lots of books in there about such exciting things as Enigma and other parts of history. It's good that someone has taken up the task of spoon feeding the youth of today with something other than 90 second ads.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Witholding Ultra information is by no means the most interesting thing the British government did to try and get us out of our isolationist mode and into war. Thomas Mahl wrote an excellent (though fact-packed) book called Desperate Deception, which talks about the hundreds of things the British tried to do to bring us into war. The OSS (precursor to the CIA)? Formed with the help of the British. Female British agents hopping in the sack with Senators. American (bui British-run) polls finding 80% of young men in favor of a draft. Great stuff. I recommend this for any conspiracy junkie out there. (Here's a link to the book.)