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Crypto Show on the History Channel Tonight (9/12)

Posted by Hemos on from the cracking-the-code dept.

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. "

6 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Whoa...sudden flash forward... by JoeShmoe · · Score: 5

    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
  2. Crypto show... by dark&stormynight · · Score: 3

    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

  3. Grandpa by RobertGraham · · Score: 3
    I just purchased a copy of Cryptonomicon for my Grandfather, as he was involved in the crypto-effort during the war (he's a native German speaker/translator). Since I'm part of security company, I thought the parallel was interesting.

    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.

  4. Re:Definitely worth the watch. by bjohnson · · Score: 4

    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.

  5. Polish cryptoanalysts broke Enigma by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    Have a look at: http://www.polamjournal.com/library/enigma.html Enigma machines were stolen from Germans by polish secret service.

  6. Further References by Multics · · Score: 3

    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.