I from a crypto history book I read in high school: in WWI, German intercepts of Russian transmissions have the Russians illusions of German tactical genius. Somehow, Germans would often be in position to confound the Russians. The reason for this: Russian code clerks were badly trained. Sometimes there would be a couple of attempts to send a message followed by a plain-text transmission by the frustrated code clerk. This was a tremendous boon to German cryptographers in the long term as well as a giveaway of tactical maneuvers in the short term.
In WWII, the Germans had their turn at incompetence. Enigma machines were supposed to be "warmed up" by 3 random characters. The purpose of this is like an Initial Vector or a "nonce" in modern block cipher use -- a bit of entropy to help obscure often almost identical message headers. A lot of German code clerks were lazy and just typed in "AAA", which helped out the Bletchley Park cryptographers a lot.
Modern crypto technology is often very good, but only if used correctly. Security fails most often because of human error. (This includes programmers!)
While we're telling war stories. ;) Nonces played a role in a major American blunder too.
During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Admiral Halsey moved his massive Third fleet out of position to chase a Japanese ruse. The Japanese then moved their Central Force through the gap and attacked the much smaller and ill-prepared Seventh Fleet.
The commander of the Seventh Fleet sent several desperate messages asking for Halsey's help, causing Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor to send a message to Halsey asking, simply "WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR?" (Task Force 34 was the Third Fleet's detachment of battleships).
His clerk changed the message to WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR? And then, while forming the message, added the beginning nonce "TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG" and the trailing nonce "RR THE WORLD WONDERS". The "GG" and "RR" were indicators of the end and beginning of the nonces.
Halsey's clerk removed the first nonce, but left the last one "THE WORLD WONDERS" as part of the message, apparently missing the "RR". So when Halsey got the message, it read "WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR THE WORLD WONDERS".
Halsey interpreted the message as sarcastic criticism of his decisions by a commanding officer over official channels, and flew into a rage. He then decided to delay the Third Fleet's assistance of the Seventh Fleet, ostensibly to refuel his destroyers.
Had he sent the battleships immediately, they likely would have crossed the Central Force's T and crushed them. It would have been one of the greatest (and last) battleship duels in history.
Of course the blunder didn't affect the outcome of the war, or even the battle in a strategic since. The Seventh Fleet was able to turn the Central Force back, mostly through self-sacrificial courage on the part of the destroyer crews.
the Third Fleet was able to turn the Central Fleet back on their own mostly through self-sacrificial courage on the part of the destroyers.
I know of that action from documentaries. Basically, the destroyers engaged heavier ship classes which they theoretically had no hope against. In some cases, "charged" is actually more apt than "engaged."
All crypto systems fail when faced with human operators!
There was one story of an Afrika corp operator who sent HIT - LER as the 2 'secret' triplets every day for the entire North Africa campaign. Then disastrously he was captured!
It's an interesting question as to whether at least the best (4-wheel naval) system could be cracked without operator error or deliberate plain text seeding.
The only flaw of the enigma is that a letter cannot be encrypted to itself - I have heard different accounts of if this was enough to always make it crackable.
It's an interesting bit of military psychology that while every side in WWII broke their enemy's codes - all of them believed all their own codes to be unbreakable!
It wasn't a nonce as such - it was a key exchange, slightly more like a salt in modern terms.
One of the main failings of the Germans was their love of formal introductions and sign offs in official messages, especially by the navy which otherwise had rather better crypto than the other branches. However if you are already stuck with a language that has a very fixed word and sentence structure you don't help by signing all your messages with the same 40 character long formal greeting.
It wasn't a nonce as such - it was a key exchange, slightly more like a salt in modern terms.
The way we think about ciphers has almost completely changed with the advent of cheap computation. Also, I read that book in High School and haven't thought much about Enigma in about 16 years, so it's entirely possible I got that a bit wrong.
However if you are already stuck with a language that has a very fixed word and sentence structure you don't help by signing all your messages with the same 40 character long formal greeting.
So, if you want to keep secrets, it doesn't pay to have a stick up your...
Another way to put it: it pays to be more like Snoop Dogg and less like Colonel Klink.
A really great book [1] which details how Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski exploited a lot of these human errors and managed to keep up with the changes of the Enigma machine.
which is outside the NSA headquarters. They have old Enigma machines, which are quite compact, about typewriter size, as well as a decoder, which is more like a bank of refrigerators. And a lot of other artifacts. It seemed to be mainly a labor of love by retirees and crypto geeks, rather than some officially compiled museum. Rather touching, in a surprising way.
I like this story, because it draws the whole complex masquerade operation together around a nice focal point.
Fortitude was a very complicated operation (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude, it even involved faking two entire fictitious armies :D) but executed brilliantly - one of my favourite pieces of war history.
Amateurs! One modern leader of an impoverished 3rd world country managed to fake an entire nuclear, biological, chemical warfare capability and the ICBMs necessary to attack Britain within 45mins.
And he did it so successfully we were forced to invade.
After doing it once, he had a lot of credibility when he said "Hey, remember the centrifuges the Germans helped us build in the 80's? and the chemical weapons we bought from Germany, refined with French equipment, and used to genocide the Kurds? Yeah, we're doing that stuff again."
Did anyone else notice that the BBC tarted up their headline to the point that it's actually false? The piece of paper was written by the Germans. It didn't "fool" them. It was proof that the Germans had been fooled, but I guess that's not quite as good for linkbait.
If you have broken the enemies crypto AND he doesn't know you have - then you can also send fake messages which they are going to believe.
So the Brits could have sent a message ordering a few panzer armies from Normandy to the Pas de Calais. It doesn't seem that this was ever done - presumably because it gave the game away.
Even more interestingly - the Brits kept secret that they had cracked enigma into the 1980s because after the war they distributed the 'uncrackable' German code machine to lots of rather gullible allies
I thought the same thing, and was very skeptical about all this 'published for the first time!' as I could swear there was a fictional-historical movie made around the 60's based on the premise of Operation Mincemeat!
Perhaps you're thinking of "36 Hours", where German psychologist Rod Taylor tries to convince drugged and captured Army officer James Garner that the war is long over, the Nazis vanquished, but he's suffering from amnesia that occurred years later. As part of your therapy to recover your memory, if you could just confirm that you remember where and when the invasion occurred... Mincemeat is offstage, but I think it was part of the set up.
Saw it in a theater when I was a lad -- too young to properly appreciate Eva Marie Saint, alas.
This is very tangential, but I just happened to finish the "Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman last night. If any HN military history buffs have not read it yet, do pick it up. Although about the opening of WWI, it provides some great insight into both World Wars.
Amazing book, highly detailed. Watching the madness of supposedly rational men bowing to militarism and nationalism, whipped along by supposedly inviolate plans and timetables, creating the conditions for not one but two world wars...it's all the stuff of nightmares.
Agreed. And yet, you walk away better understanding how those nightmares can become reality. By chance, I picked up Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" from a sidewalk seller, and was struck by her ability to address so many parts of a whole. After finding that she won the Pulitzer for "The Guns of August", I had to read it.
I've heard that JFK was a big fan of "The Guns of August", and made it required reading in his cabinet.
As an aside, Tuchman is now recognized for the following reflection, which is often paraphrased as Tuchman's Law: "Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena."
Oh, BTW: On the topic of encryption, I can't believe the Russians were sending unencrypted orders in WWI over wireless!
This reminds me, I'm still reading Cryptonomicon. I find Stephenson's work to be really hard to get into, then hard to put down once you do. Guess I'll keep at it.
There's a documentary (2009, imdb link: http://www.imdb.es/title/tt1344315/) called "Garbo, the Spy" (Garbo was one of his nicknames). It's in spanish but i'm pretty sure there are english subtitles on the DVD.
This work won the Goya (Spanish National Cinema Award) last year for better documentary.
I read the article and thought: "At least, some british recognition to Pujol" :-)
Does anyone know if all the intercepted German WW2 dispatches have been decrypted? If there's a pile of undecrypted dispatches sitting in a vault somewhere, it could be of great interest to historians if someone applied modern computers and code-breaking techniques to them.
We wouldn't need any codebreaking techniques; we know their encryption method. I suspect feeding the papers through OCR would be the most time consuming part. I doubt decrypting would take any longer than SSL.
Actually, there is one message left to be decrypted. See http://www.bytereef.org/m4_project.html . Since the link points to a distributed project dedicated to decrypting the last 3 undecrypted Enigma messages, we can safely assume there's significant computational effort necessary.
We know the method, but we also need the key used for any particular message, unless Enigma has been thoroughly broken. IIRC (from The Code Book), at the end of the war Bletchley park couldn't break German naval messages. (They used the same machine as everyone else, but with less predictable messages.)
The search space is small enough that the only "hard" part is telling if the message is properly decoded. They might not have used predictable messages but simply testing for the number of German words / phrases in a given output should work just as well. Assuming the actual messages are not overly cryptic.
In short, the Navy, specifically U boats, used a non-standard, stronger crypto (in this, more rotors) Enigma machine, called M4. They formed their own Enigma network called "Triton" which the allies called "Shark".
Due to their hardening, and less message sent for traffic analysis, these machines were "safer" against cryptanalysis.
Wasn't the whole point of Collossus that it was brute-forcing the messages on the more complex Naval keys until it found a candidate match? That's certainly what I remember from visiting Bletchley Park.
In any case, there are now (finally!) software implementations that are significantly faster than the reproduced hardware Collossus, so even if I'm not fully right brute-forcing messages should be viable.
Tunny was the British codename for data from the Lorenz machine, which is what Collossus was working on. The original Enigma machines were attacked by Bombe machines developed by Polish codebreakers pre-war.
Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett is a great fictionalized spy novel centered around Operation Fortitude and spy catching in the UK during the second world war.
Because of their code-breaking, British intelligence was able to catch most German agents as soon as they arrived. Some of them were given the opportunity to "turn double". One example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chapman
Note that "given the opportunity" meant "given the choice between execution and turning double agent", though some chose to turn themselves in and offer themselves up as double agents of their own will.
So thanks to this piece of paper West Germany and probably Itay and Austria too didn't become communist states because the Americans got there before the Russians?
In WWII, the Germans had their turn at incompetence. Enigma machines were supposed to be "warmed up" by 3 random characters. The purpose of this is like an Initial Vector or a "nonce" in modern block cipher use -- a bit of entropy to help obscure often almost identical message headers. A lot of German code clerks were lazy and just typed in "AAA", which helped out the Bletchley Park cryptographers a lot.
Modern crypto technology is often very good, but only if used correctly. Security fails most often because of human error. (This includes programmers!)